


No more wonderland

by Dynamite3539



Category: Pokemon Uranium - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2018-11-20 20:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 30,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11342259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dynamite3539/pseuds/Dynamite3539
Summary: [huge spoilers for both Pokemon Uranium and my other fic, Steel-type Playthrough]We were all young once.Lucille, halfway through an engineering degree in a distant region, travels to Tandor's Silverport Town for industry placement at the Tandor Power Company (TAPCO). She's going to earn her wage here, make a good impression, get her credit, then go home, and everyone will move on.If only things were always so straightforward.





	1. Chapter 1

The showers were different in Tandor.

Both the shower in the rental house, which blasted an exorbitantly pressured jet of water down onto her back, and the rain showers, which tended to be more intense and unexpected than those in Zhery.

It was her first morning alone in the opulent but cosy Silverport Town. She’d met her new neighbours, an old woman with two cats and an estate, and an expat family with two young children. These were nice and normal. She’d unpacked most of her clothes and belongings, though they didn’t quite fit into the small built-in robe in the master bedroom.

All that was left now was her morning juice. She could never stand coffee.

The research lab sat a short drive from town, a little way up the mountain. She often heard good things about Snowbank Town further north, and thought it might make a good destination for a Christmas getaway.

The lab had free parking.

She pulled up in her brand new car, painted in sunflower yellow because it was the only colour they could get for her at short notice. It stood garishly mismatched with the idyllic surroundings, but that was fine. She blended in just fine.

Her sensible work shoes didn’t make much noise against the concrete. ‘Welcome to TAPCO Silverport’, read a sign by the lot, backed by a squat, sprawling building set amid nicely manicured gardens.

The receptionist took her name and directed her to her new supervisor’s office.

“Dr. Kuritsyn, Lucille Mayer is here,” the receptionist said, and left them alone.

The supervisor had a kind smile. “Hi Lucille,” he said, the skin beside his eyes crinkling. “You can call me Viktor.”

“Hi,” she replied shyly.

“You had a good journey from Inhore?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“That’s good.”

She didn’t speak much. She was too shy to, really. It wasn’t that she had nothing to say, but that as a young woman, an intern, and a foreigner no less, she had decided it would be better to keep a low profile.

Viktor Kuritsyn gave her an overview of the project she would be working on. TAPCO, the nuclear power giant of Tandor, was researching ways to improve efficiency at their uranium mines. Lucille Mayer would be testing a new species of worker pokemon.

She’d drawn the short straw for internships, really. All her friends had stayed in Inhore City for the summer, or at most flown elsewhere in Zhery. As a biochemical engineer, she wanted nothing less than to work for a power company. But jobs were in short supply, and she needed a placement to graduate.

“Come on, let’s go for a walk,” Viktor suggested. “You can see where we keep the pokemon.”

The gardens were truly lush, and the mountain air untainted by the noise and fumes of the city down below. Lucille Mayer let the cool breeze wash over her as Viktor described the controlled process for testing – many aspects of the new pokemon had to be considered, such as strength, speed, radiation resistance, and temperament. Their methods of measurement were unknown to her, and seemed far too subjective for the classes she took at university.

Two other scientists approached with the sun on their backs.

“Good morning, Viktor,” they said in passing. Lucille Mayer was ignored.

The courtyard stood not much further away, flanked by two run-down buildings which struck her as more shed than lab.

“You’ll probably be spending most of your time in here,” Viktor said apologetically. “Though you have a desk in the temp office for when you need to write up.”

Viktor unlocked the door on the left-hand shed. There was a musty, farm-like smell inside, something Lucille was not used to. Several pairs of eyes stared back at her as she swept her gaze over the room.

“They’re Sheebits,” Viktor said, opening one of the cages and scooping out the pokemon. Lucille ran a hand hesitantly over its smooth, brown fur, and patted ones of its knobbly, ram-like horns. The Sheebit bleated at her.

He talked for a while about the work they would be doing together, and the conversation put Lucille at ease. The more he spoke, the more she heard words which were familiar and comfortable to her. This was going to be okay. She would earn her wage here, make a good impression, then she would go home and everyone would move on.

“Here are some papers,” Viktor said, his smile still kind. “You don’t have to read them.”

The freshly printed stack sent up a cloud of dust as Viktor set it on a filing cabinet.

“And an experiment schedule,” he finished, handing Lucille a single sheet pocked with fold marks, as if several people had disagreed on which way the creases sat best.

“This will be more useful,” Viktor added wryly. “If you think of anything else, sing out and we’ll chat about it.”

He didn’t make her work on the first day. They sat in the canteen together, and he blew off a meeting or two. He continued describing the research, gradually straying into theoretical territory, revealing all but the most secret of his ideas. He hadn’t meant to, but Lucille’s calmness relaxed him too.

Nominally, Viktor Kuritsyn studied the economic utility of Sheebit and other species. Below the surface, murkier waters ran. He had made odd observations, anomalies in the pokemon’s DNA which manifested only upon the most perseverant of investigations. Although Lucille was temporary, he told her in the hopes he would tickle her curiosity, and she would take the challenge to look further.

If she was a good fit, Viktor intended to offer her a permanent job as his assistant. Lately, it plagued him to admit, he had been swamped with work, and the ideas were slow in coming.


	2. Chapter 2

Lucille loved the gardens.

In between slow, repetitive work in the lab, she would put in her earphones and go for a walk, weaving between the towering pine trees, around the luxuriant manicured beds and over the hill which stretched above and beyond the gardener’s concern. The hill was her favourite. Blanketed with a tangle of wild grasses and shrubs, nobody bothered to pay it any heed, yet it didn’t grow out of control, as if restraint came from within. Lucille let the place know it was appreciated, but she didn’t think it cared. For decades before her arrival, the hill had regulated itself, and it would continue to do so for decades after she left.

“What’re you listening to?” Viktor Kuritsyn would ask when she returned.

“Not much,” she would reply.

Eventually he would draw it out of her, and they discovered a mutual love of music from the 80s. Viktor would come visit her in the lab, and they sang together when the work went well, giving them both an excuse to smile now and then. 

Several weeks later, Lucille surprised him by producing carefully prepared DNA samples from the Sheebits, which had taken a liking to her. She often let them out of their cages, taking them outside to play in the courtyard. Their fur looked healthier, touched regularly by the rays of the sun.

“What’s this?” Viktor asked.

“You were right,” Lucille said mysteriously, her mouth turning up. “There’s something strange about this DNA... It’s extremely stable.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” Viktor said happily, more hopeful about a future with Lucille than any of his old observations she had stumbled upon.

“Not bad. Interesting,” Lucille agreed.

She explained how she had split the strands of DNA, and instead of disintegrating after a short while, they had sought out other pieces and recombined. She had never seen or heard of this behaviour before. She had learned basic genetic modification theory, but in this case the genes had rearranged themselves, unassisted.

Lucille had no idea of the implications, or even the significance of what she had discovered, so she discussed it with Viktor. She was a newcomer in the world of pokemon, and Viktor a seasoned professional. Lucille did not have the confidence to draw conclusions on her own, though Viktor was impressed at the insight she showed in trying.

He moved his desk out to the old shed, and they hurried along with TAPCO’s mining project, finishing all the required paperwork with four weeks of Lucille’s placement to spare. Sheebit had been deemed unsuitable for work in mines, due to low radiation tolerance and a feisty temperament. The horned creatures seemed only to listen to Lucille, who Viktor suspected they now saw as a friend instead of a captor.

After the papers were filed, they settled in for the long haul, the final stretch before Lucille would be forced to return to Zhery. Working side by side in the lab, Viktor Kuritsyn and Lucille Mayer conducted experiment after experiment, peering down their microscopes, handling tiny samples with the utmost care, and discussing theories and possibilities late into the night. Every day, one of them would be dispatched to the Silverport supermarket before it closed at nine, to bring back snacks and sandwiches for dinner.

It was usually Viktor who went, as Lucille’s sunflower-yellow car struggled a little up the hill. Though she wouldn’t admit it, she also preferred to stay within the clean, green enclave of the TAPCO site, a place which had become more of a home to her than the luxurious rental house she returned to late at night.

She always returned alone. They never worked past midnight, and when it was time to go, she and Viktor would say their goodbyes and go their separate ways, she down the hill to Silverport, and he out west to the suburbs.

In this manner, Lucille’s first paper was ready for publication by the end of her internship – a short four-page article detailing the results of her experiments with Viktor, and hypothesising that the properties of Sheebit’s DNA made it a promising target for the first ever trials of pokemon cloning.

Lucille refused to take main credit for the discoveries. As soon as she found out that Viktor had already made the observations ahead of her arrival, she obstinately insisted that his name be put first on the paper. She was embarrassed at the confidence she had felt, thinking that the success had been her own. The more she thought about it, the more she realised that even the very idea for the investigation had been given her by Viktor.

So, as a result, she shrank away from it all, hoping to just go home and try again next year.

“The work was yours,” Viktor tried reasoning with her. “I only found the stability...”

“I insist,” Lucille interrupted him, and she was so sincere about it he couldn’t turn her down.

The paper was published under Viktor Kuritsyn’s name, listing Lucille Mayer as co-author.

He offered her a permanent job for after she graduated, singing her praises and telling her how brilliant he found her. All of this was true. Lucille declined politely, saying she would miss Zhery far too much, and that was that.


	3. Chapter 3

Life rarely gives you the breaks you work hard for.

Two years later, graduating amidst a tumultuous downturn in Zhery’s economy, Lucille found herself turned away by every biotech and pharmaceutical company she applied to.

The reasons were always the same. We prefer your friends who interned here. Have you ever worked with process equipment before? TAPCO – what’s that?

Connection politics still ran deep, and there was only one thing Lucille had going on that front.

“We’re sorry we can’t help,” her parents said a lot, as if the whole affair was their fault. Of course, they wished for Lucille to remain in Zhery, but if she needed to be working to be happy, they would let her go.  

“TAPCO Larkspur,” her call was answered on the third ring.

“Oh…” Lucille paused. “Is this the Silverport lab?”

“Yes,” the receptionist replied. “We changed our name a while ago. How can I help you?”

She asked to be passed to Viktor, and he seemed delighted to hear from her.

“I’m in a pinch right now,” Lucille explained. “I hate to ask, but do you have any work for me?”

Of course he did! Viktor Kuritsyn hadn’t forgotten the offer he made all that time ago; he couldn’t, when it was Lucille it concerned.

“For permanent tenure, you’ll need a doctorate,” he said, keeping his voice level. “But that won’t be a problem for you. We can support you as a techie while you do your research.”

Lucille wouldn’t ask outright what projects were available, and Viktor was more than happy to exploit her coyness and gloss over the subject, keeping the conversation pleasant. He provided updates on the lives of her old colleagues – who had married, who was being promoted, whose noxious attitudes he still thought belonged out in the mines. This made Lucille smile.

“I’ll send you a contract,” he said, following what Lucille thought was flatteringly little deliberation. “You can start in the new year.”

After that, life suddenly sped up to a blur. Lucille needed to secure the rental and a car, and pack for a more permanent stay in Silverport Town. Her friends encouraged her to take a pokemon companion, but she knew she wouldn’t have time to care for it.

“Your house will be so empty,” they would say.

“Well, I won’t be there to notice,” she would reply with a smile. By then, Lucille had only fond memories of TAPCO and had grown excited to return, despite herself.

Three months’ rent and the new parking fee taken care of, she had enough left over for a deposit on a new car. The vehicle was silver, which was a relief.

Her street felt wonderfully familiar, albeit quiet now the expat family had moved away.

“The kids are going to school in Burole Town,” the elderly neighbour explained.

Above all, Lucille was pleased to see Viktor again. He had always treated her so well. The lines around his eyes had deepened, but this only made his face appear warmer.

“You’ve got your own office now, hotshot,” he said, leading her through the labyrinthine analytical wing to a modest, sparsely furnished room with a peripheral view of the lush gardens. “You're going to be a spectroscopy technician; the training won’t take long. We can discuss research plans once you’re up and running.”

As expected, the lab work wasn’t difficult for someone as bright as Lucille. She lunched quickly, learned quicker, and turned out sample compositions more expediently than even the most longstanding employees. Lucille Mayer was an easy job for her supervisor.

“Sure you don’t want to stay full time?” he asked, disappointed, as she prepared for her first PhD meeting with Viktor.

“You really cleared the backlog down there,” Viktor said, amused. “I’ll introduce you to Rudi sometime, if they haven’t already.”

For old times’ sake, they held their meeting in Lucille’s old home, the Sheebit shed. Though it had been subdivided, being in the place still drew them together as if a switch had been flipped. The remaining pokemon no longer recognised Lucille, though her gentle handling ensured they were relaxed regardless. Muffled conversation and sounds of tinkering would reach them from beyond the dividing walls, but if she turned her back, Lucille could well pretend they didn’t exist. Viktor helped, seeming disinclined to talk about the projects underway there.

“Rudi’s interested in their cloning potential,” he said regarding the Sheebits. “But we haven’t had anyone free to work on that. You’ve come along just in time.”

“That’s great,” Lucille said, taking a deep breath and committing the musty scent to memory.

Viktor described the new facilities at the site which Lucille would be free to use – the large centrifuges, 3D printing, bio-incubators, and a synchrotron slated for completion in a year’s time.

Lucille wondered what was in it for TAPCO, which provided the funding, and Viktor sensed her curiosity. He explained how Rudi Larkspur had been selected to head the Flagship six months ago, because of his ambitious plans for developing fast neutron technology – a type of reactor which had the potential to become a virtually limitless source of nuclear energy.

“They’re happy to fund whatever else he wants to do, as long as FNRs remain a priority,” Viktor said with a nonchalant shrug. Lucille nodded. She could see the enormous benefits for the company, and if that meant she could continue working with the Sheebits, she was happy.

“You’re going to do good here,” Viktor said to her, and Lucille was grateful for his support. They hugged like old friends, and she would remember this perfect moment for years to come.


	4. Chapter 4

What the hell are perfect moments anyway?

Life was amazing at first. Lucille would do her shift in the ICP lab every morning, then spend the afternoon and most of the evening absorbed in her research. Progress started slow, but Viktor was an invaluable help, providing her with specialist contacts in a wide variety of fields.

Once her process was refined, Lucille was able to make Sheebit DNA take immediately to a host cell, which she subsequently subjected to accelerated development in one of the bio-incubators, with very high success rates. The cloned Sheebits showed remarkable characteristics, often retaining the moves and select memories of their originals.

This last discovery was made quite by accident, after Lucille cloned the pokemon whose cage was situated by the shed door, a creature which had over the years been conditioned to shrink back when it heard the bolts sliding, as the old hinges would shower one side of its cage with dust when the door was opened.

Rudi Larkspur was quite fascinated by Lucille’s progress, and rumour had it she was highly praised in the upper echelons. Hen Rodriguez and the other scientists would sometimes greet her now as she walked with Viktor.

Uninterested in dancing with any high society, Lucille preferred to sit alone or with Viktor during breaks, when they watched the synchrotron construction to pass the time. Lucille noticed her favourite hill had been razed to make room for the facility, but Viktor had nothing but praise for this behemoth of cutting-edge nuclear physics.

“What kinds of memories can you transfer?” he asked her one day in a lull in conversation.

“Procedural, certainly,” Lucille replied, referring to unconsciously learned abilities. “The rest, I’m not so sure. It’s harder to test for the other types.”

“Do you plan to?” Viktor asked.

Lucille examined him curiously. “No. I’ve reached capacity in there. I’m not producing any more pokemon.”

“Any way you could make some space?”

Lucille laughed at his congenial, apologetic expression. “What do you need, Viktor?”

Viktor averted his gaze to the emerging synchrotron. “Rudi asked for a favour. He needs your expertise, to see if certain traits can be cloned.”

“Which ones? I might already know.”

Viktor shook his head. “We’re working on a new type of serum. It seems to be selective.”

“Is that so?” Lucille asked with an expectant smile.

Viktor hadn’t meant to overshare, but, once again, something about Lucille’s earnest innocence meant he couldn’t keep his guard up, and he let all the details spill. He described how Rudi’s serum semi-permanently enhanced the trait of submissiveness and induced compliance in the specimens it affected. Lucille was suitably horrified.

“What do you want such a thing for?” she exclaimed. “Has Larkspur lost his mind?” Lucille spoke loudly enough to attract attention from neighbouring tables; this seemed to unnerve Viktor, and he quickly placed a hand over hers.

“Lucille,” he almost whispered. “This is useful. It could subdue hostile wild pokemon.”

“That’s what capture stylers are for,” Lucille countered.

“Permanently,” Viktor said, regaining some confidence. “And we could use darts – no need to put any people in danger.”

Lucille didn’t have to think for more than a few seconds. “I refuse. Good luck, but I want nothing to do with your project.”

Before Viktor could protest, Lucille had risen from the table. She gave him a withering glance in parting, rattled enough by their exchange that she didn’t notice the whole canteen had gone quiet.

Viktor called her that night to apologise.

It was the first time they had spoken outside the office, so it was weird.

“I accept your refusal,” he began. “I won’t bring it up again.”

Lucille wasn’t sure how to respond. Eventually, she settled on, “Vitya, don’t get yourself involved in anything sinister, okay?”

“I appreciate your concern,” Viktor said carefully. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but Rudi Larkspur is a powerful man. I need to play the game right. We all do.”

“Don’t be silly,” Lucille scoffed. “What’s the worst he can do? Cut your Christmas bonus?” She was surprised by her own candour.

“All right,” Viktor said unsatisfyingly.

Lucille was left confused by the conversation, but decided not to press.

So, life went back to normal, in a way. Lucille gradually wrote up her research, cooped up in her little office, beams of sunlight catching dust motes as they lit up the stacks of paper surrounding her desk. She published the bare minimum required for her doctorate, and the rest she gave to Viktor. He never pretended to understand why, but he knew better than to protest Lucille’s altruism by now.

Lucille also grew quite affectionate with her ICP supervisor, a man by the name of Frederik Summer. Their relationship was, if such a thing were possible, even more platonic than that between Lucille and Viktor, though Frederik often caught himself thinking of her in other ways, and felt guilty for it. Their conversations were limited by each other’s shyness to him asking her to “forget about” a batch of samples here or there, or her checking dilution ratios for a sample with an uncommon solvent.

She only wished she’d gotten to know him better when, one fine spring day after the synchrotron was opened, Frederik was quoted in a local newspaper as saying not everyone at TAPCO Larkspur supported fast neutron technology. The morning afterwards, he didn’t turn up to work.

None of them ever saw him again.


	5. Chapter 5

Ignorance is bliss, even artificial ignorance.

If there was any one person at TAPCO Larkspur who could continue as if nothing was wrong, as if there were no darkness brooding beneath the surface, it was Lucille Mayer.

She was a source of fascination to Viktor – as colleagues and former friends all around him, whether out of fear or true admiration, began to adopt Larkspur’s fanatic approach to their work, Lucille would put in her earphones, shut the door to her office or the shed, and block them all out.

She never spoke out against Larkspur, and often acted very much as if he did not exist. Viktor and the others could not figure out if she was doing this to protect herself, or if her feeling of security was genuine.

In time, Frederik Summer was no longer the only person to have been removed from TAPCO and Silverport Town. There were quiet sackings and more public humiliations, threats against families and unexplained break-ins. Lucille would tune out when Viktor tried to address the matter in conversation, and this left him feeling more afraid than he would have liked to admit.

This precarious apathy continued for a tense three months.

Lucille was forced to confront reality when, on a balmy Tuesday that summer, just before Christmas, she had the need to rummage deep in her bottom drawer to find some old ICP printouts. Quick to locate the folder, she was startled when a crumpled piece of paper fell from within.

This scrap contained a note scribbled in Frederik’s characteristic scrawl.

_“Check the radiation level of your Sheebits.”_

The message sent a chill down her spine. Lucille was not oblivious, despite the façade she maintained for her own sanity. Trusting Frederik, even in his absence, Lucille drove herself to follow up on his warning. She obtained a radiation monitor, something of a routine piece of equipment, and discovered to her horror that the ambient radiation at the back of her shed was slightly above safe levels. This had evidently had no effect on her, but the Sheebits were being held near those walls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Her heart in her throat, Lucille took tissue samples from the Sheebits located furthest back, examining them under a microscope. She discovered the beginnings of radiation damage and genetic anomalies, and began to grow truly fearful of what was happening behind those dividing walls.

It was in this state of heightened alertness that Lucille began to notice abnormal behaviour in the pokemon. Usually a lively species, the Sheebits had become sedate and compliant, as if waiting for something – a command.

Unfortunately, these Sheebits no longer knew moves; this was a requirement for being able to keep them safely in the lab. This state was unconducive to the kind of testing Lucille now wanted to administer. So, squashing her considerable fear, she stayed back especially late that night, telling Viktor she wanted to finish her latest paper before the Christmas break. He didn’t think anything of it; everyone was accustomed to Lucille’s late nights.

Around midnight, with the TAPCO site shrouded in a dusky somnolence, Lucille quietly made her way to the Sheebit shed, removing one of the pokemon from its cage by the wall. Armed with a TM – Headbutt – Lucille loaded the sleepy Sheebit into the back of her car, and drove them both someway up the hill towards Snowbank Town.

In a suitably deserted area, far from either of the urban zones at the top and bottom of the mountain, Lucille released the Sheebit and applied the TM. Awakened by the cold night air, the pokemon faced her with a spaced-out gaze, awaiting instruction.

Voice shaking, Lucille ordered the Sheebit to use Headbutt, pointing at a nearby tree, and it obeyed without hesitation, causing the sturdy pine to tremble and shed its load of snow all over the surrounding ground.

She tried again, then once more, with the same results. After each attack, the Sheebit returned to a patient waiting stance. 

Lucille knew immediately that something was wrong. These pokemon were not trained – like wilds, they were not supposed to respond to commands from people. She could think of only one explanation for this.

Viktor Kuritsyn was asleep when she called, but, hearing the urgency in her voice, agreed to meet her at a park in central Silverport.

“Can’t we talk over the phone?” Viktor had complained at first.

When Lucille responded with, “No,” Viktor knew something had started to shift inside of her.

Down in the valley, the air was still balmy. Lucille, exhausted from manhandling the Sheebit, cut straight to the chase as she walked up to her friend, who was waiting for her by the lake.

“Viktor, has someone used the serum on my Sheebits?” she asked.

He was taken aback by this question. “I… No!” he exclaimed. “Why would you think that?”

“Tell me the truth, Viktor,” Lucille pleaded.

“Honest to God!” Viktor asserted. “I swear I haven’t done anything of the sort, and I don’t know that anyone else has either. Please tell me what’s going on.”

Lucille examined him with a new intensity in her eyes.

“I swear on my life,” Viktor said more quietly.

After a long pause, Lucille confided in him. She had nobody else. “The Sheebits are acting... just how you said the serum would make them act. They’re subdued. They do whatever I tell them to.”

“Just the cloned ones?” Viktor probed.

“No… All of…” Lucille’s eyes widened. “The ones by the dividing wall. Viktor, do you know what’s happening on the other side?”

“Do you have any idea?”

“Does it matter?” Lucille pressed.

Viktor cleared his throat and looked down. “Larkspur is working on a... new type of reactor, you could say.”

A heavy silence settled over that bridge on the lake. They both knew the Sheebit shed was as far as you could get from the FNR complex.

“Does TAPCO know?” Lucille asked at last.

“I’m not sure,” Viktor replied.

In the silence which followed, Lucille let out a large yawn. Viktor went to put an arm around her, but stopped himself in time.

“I think the radiation is causing the changes,” Lucille said, looking into the distance. “I measured unsafe levels by the wall.”

Viktor nodded. “That's interesting.”

“I want to investigate this myself,” Lucille said with sudden fervour. “Please don’t tell anyone. Especially not Larkspur.”

“I promise,” Viktor assured her. His face collapsed into a grimace. “Be thankful he still thinks you’re useful – he would baulk if this ever got out.”

Lucille frowned. “Useful? What do you mean?”

“Come on, Lucille,” Viktor skirted her question. “This is serious now.”

He got the feeling he hadn’t needed to tell her.

“Larkspur has too much power over TAPCO. They can’t – or they won’t – stop him.”


	6. This is serious, Lucille

And so, Lucille tried – she really did.

She made sure not to set a foot out of line, not to draw any attention to herself, not to take any action which might have come close to giving Rudi Larkspur a reason to barge into her shed one morning, unannounced and accompanied by three technicians.

Lucille stood by helplessly while the four men busied themselves taking fur samples from her Sheebits, shining lights in the creatures’ eyes, combing the room with radiation monitors, gas monitors, portable spectroscopic devices of every shape and kind. The pokemon, subdued though they were, bleated in fright as they were roughly thrown back into their cages after each examination.

“Dr Larkspur,” she tried through gritted teeth, but Larkspur gave no indication that he had even heard her.

It wasn’t until a week after this bizarre incident, by which time Lucille was being tentatively avoided by all her colleagues in the ICP lab, that she was summoned by Larkspur to his office above the shiny new synchrotron.

She would have been the first to admit surprise at seeing Viktor there, also in the firing line.

Larkspur began by tersely alleging that a concerned coworker had seen Lucille neglecting standard procedure while handling the biological samples she'd examined by microscope. Furthermore, someone had reported the lethargic appearance of the Sheebits, concerned about the wellbeing of the pokemon.

Lucille exchanged a glance with Viktor. _This has to be some sort of joke._

“I brought a team to audit you last week,” Larkspur continued crisply, causing both their heads to snap back towards him. “I’m sure you remember.”

“Yes, sir,” Lucille said after a long, expectant silence.

“What we discovered came as a surprise,” Larkspur said. “I could tell you all about it, but there’s no need for that... because you already know. Isn’t that right, Dr Mayer?” His lips wrapped themselves lithely around the word ‘doctor’.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lucille said levelly, blood pulsing through her chest. Nobody had seen her that day in the lab; she was sure she had been alone.

“Viktor, then I’m sure you could fill us in,” Larkspur refocused his attention with a smile.

“N… No, Rudi, I couldn’t,” Viktor said, a vein standing out in his neck.

Larkspur’s smile was unwavering. “How’s your sister doing, Viktor? You told me she was expecting, if I remember correctly.”

Viktor said nothing, but eventually his head dipped into a stiff nod.

“How delightful,” Larkspur said. “Do pass on my congratulations.”

Lucille and Viktor were promptly dismissed, and it took until lunchtime for the hairs on Lucille’s arms to stop standing on end.

Unfortunately, there was no respite in the canteen, and Viktor elected to sit with Hen Rodriguez and Cedric Parker. Lucille, left alone at her window table, was halfway through her salad when a ruckus at the front made her turn. Rudi Larkspur had positioned himself with exaggerated fanfare in front of a standing microphone, which he was now tapping on to draw everyone’s attention.

“Good afternoon, friends and colleagues!” Larkspur said cheerfully as the chatter died down. “I have wonderful news to share with you all. A scientific breakthrough has been made! By none other than our own Viktor Kuritsyn, and his esteemed student Lucille Mayer…”

Heads turned expectantly to Viktor, a couple to Lucille.

“This development is sure to revolutionise our direction here at TAPCO Larkspur… Viktor, do come on up and enlighten us!”

There was total silence for several seconds. You could’ve heard a pin drop.

Viktor rose slowly to his feet, and Lucille’s heart sank as she watched him make his way to the front of the canteen. Larkspur stepped aside to give him the stage.

“Um…” Viktor began, his voice mousy. “Good afternoon.”

 _Remember your promise_ , Lucille begged silently, trying to catch his eye. 

“I’m sure most of you are aware of the serum we’ve been working on, which is able to control wild pokemon,” Viktor mumbled, looking at his feet. 

_Please._

“Lucille discovered that the same effect can be achieved with a high dose of radiation from enriched uranium…" He had started to stutter, and made an effort to pull himself together. "This has a 100% success rate, as opposed to a little over half for the serum.”

“Wonderful!” Larkspur exclaimed heartily, applauding; the sound was uncomfortably loud in the silence. Tears pricked at Lucille’s eyes. “And please, Viktor,” Larkspur continued. “Do explain to us why it’s taken so long for you to announce this news!”

Viktor’s eyes never left his shoes. “Lucille blackmailed me into staying quiet. Don’t blame her – I guess she was afraid her ideas might be stolen. It’s hard starting out in research, we’ve all been there.”

This drew a laugh from the gathered scientists, and Lucille clamped a hand over her mouth to stop herself crying aloud.

Larkspur tutted into the microphone. “What a shame this gem was kept hidden from us for so long. I'm sure we'll be able to find many uses for… Lucille!” Larkspur sounded disappointed to see her running for the exit. “So flighty... Don’t make us lose you too. We were so upset when Frederik Summer left us…”

Lucille ran straight for her car, not even bothering to return to her office to pick up her bag. Angry tears streaked down her face as she turned right from the parking lot, throwing the car into low gear for the climb. Snow was falling higher up the mountain, and she was by no means dressed for the weather, but she wasn’t turning back without answers. Even after all that had happened, she refused to believe that Viktor had betrayed her, which meant that somebody had seen her on the mountain that night.

Pulling over on the shoulder, Lucille tumbled from her car into a full-blown snowstorm. Shivering uncontrollably, pulling her thin jacket tight around her neck, Lucille stepped off the road and into the thicket of pines where she had conducted her tests. No, not here – anyone watching would need a higher vantage point. She started to stumble up the slope, through the solitary gap in the trees, putting more and more distance between herself and the safety of her car.

She hadn’t made it twenty metres into the frigid vortex before a heart-rending snarl tore through the whistle of the wind. Shrieking, Lucille lost her footing, floundering in a deep snow drift as the beast drew closer, camouflaged by the brilliant white flurry enveloping them both.

“Ma’am! Stay still!” a deep voice suddenly shouted, cutting above both the wind and snarls of the wild pokemon.

Lucille couldn’t stop herself from sobbing as she caught snippets of the battle through the snowstorm: a tall brown-haired ranger, commanding an Empirilla, forced the encroaching Abomasnow to retreat, attacking it until it was weak enough for him to use his capture styler to subdue.

She was still crying when the ranger waded over to help her out of the drift.

“You must be freezing,” was all he said afterwards, reclaiming his hand and considering her reservedly.

“A little. Thanks,” Lucille said, sniffing and suddenly embarrassed. She clumsily brushed the snow off her pants, trying to pull herself together. “Bad day for a walk,” she joked weakly.

The ranger let out a small giggle, as if he hadn't been prepared for his own amusement.

“Is that your car by the road? I’ll walk you back,” he finished quickly, without waiting for an answer.

They shuffled along in cryptic silence.

“Do you live in Snowbank?” he asked at last, trying to make conversation.

“No, Silverport,” Lucille replied. “You?”

“I live in Bealbeach City. I’m here on special business.”

“Okay,” Lucille said, shivering. This was neither the time nor the place for pleasantries.

“Stay away from this area, okay? It might still be dangerous,” he said in parting, as they reached Lucille’s car. She saw now that she had skewed it off the road, and left the driver’s door open. No wonder the ranger had stopped to investigate. She almost laughed.

He saw her off with a blanket retrieved from his Jeep, for which Lucille was very grateful.

It was only when she arrived back home that she realised she’d forgotten to ask for his name.

Shaken and tired, and coming down with a cold, Lucille was keen to put the whole day behind her. The next morning, a Friday, dawned bright and sunny. It was a good time for a new start.

Forcing herself to be optimistic, Lucille drove to work as usual, preparing what she would say to Viktor if he confronted her. Little butterflies ruffled her stomach as she drew into the car park, but, in the end, she needn’t have worried.

Viktor wasn’t at work that day.

Immediately, fear stabbed at Lucille’s mind as she imagined what Larkspur might have done to him. Again, she needn’t have worried.

Her colleagues were gathered around the television in the canteen, transfixed. Rudi Larkspur and Viktor Kuritsyn stared back at them from the screen, flanking a local news anchor as she delivered a special bulletin.

‘Crevasses discovered on Snowbank Mountain,’ the headline read.

“In fact, we almost lost one of our own scientists yesterday, Lucille Mayer,” Larkspur was saying. The anchor's face widened into an appropriately shocked expression. “We’re all very glad she was pulled to safety by a passing ranger.”

Lucille was appalled. A crevasse? She managed to stop herself from protesting aloud; her colleagues hadn’t noticed her arrival yet.

Viktor's expression was inscrutable as he delivered the take-home message: “We must warn all citizens of Snowbank and Silverport not to leave the sealed road if they need to travel on the mountain.”

The news anchor shook her head. “This is a troubling development indeed. After the break, we’ll be joined by…” Lucille retched, and didn’t stay to hear the end of her sentence. For the rest of the day, she felt inexplicably ill, and by 5 o’clock could stand it no longer.

Grasping her bag, she headed upstairs to talk to Viktor. The door to his office was ajar; she entered cautiously after knocking and receiving no response.

Lucille was completely dismayed by what she saw.

Viktor had his back to the door and was bent over a bin, coughing up blood, his body heaving. She rushed to him immediately and caught him by the arms. He was shaking almost uncontrollably.

“I’m sorry about everything, Lucille. I’m so scared,” Viktor whispered, his face ashen.


	7. Chapter 7

They met again by chance.

After two weeks skating on the thinnest ice at TAPCO, distressed about her crumbling relationship with Viktor, growing increasingly uneasy about what Larkspur wanted from her, Lucille broke. For the first time in her life, she went out drinking, alone, and refused to initiate a conversation with anyone, even the friendly bartender.

The other patrons were happy to leave her be.

She mumbled her research plans to herself, cementing them in her head, as if she could forget everything else and go back to pretending that only her work mattered anymore. Transfer of episodic and semantic memory. Brainwaves, electrical signals, sensor electrodes, but how to bring memories to the surface so they could be captured?

“Hey.”

Lucille lowered her face even closer to her drink.

“How have you been?”

It was the ranger who had saved her on the mountain.

“Lucille, right?” he continued, removing his jacket and struggling with his extensive gear. It seemed like he’d just walked straight off shift.

His expression changed markedly when he realised Lucille was walling him off.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, suddenly exceedingly polite. “I just thought… No, it’s okay. Have a good evening.”

“Wait,” Lucille said.

The ranger paused where he’d been about to leave.

Lucille finally turned to look at him, and he noticed her enigmatic eyes.

“I never really thanked you properly,” she said. “I was really lucky you found me that day. Thank you for saving my life.”

“Of course,” the ranger replied, his face opening up. “It’s my pleasure.”

When Lucille didn’t turn back to her drink, he took this as an invitation to sit down.

“My name’s Kellyn,” he said hopefully, trying to help her relax. “It really has been a while since I had a normal conversation.”

Perhaps the peculiar effect she had on Viktor wasn’t exclusive. The ranger, Kellyn, began to chatter, like something had loosened his tongue. At first he only talked, albeit animatedly, about his special assignment – he was staying between Silverport and Snowbank, investigating reports of unusual pokemon behaviour by the locals. Wild pokemon had become inexplicably hostile, and some domesticated pokemon had stopped responding to their trainers.

He stretched, ploughing into his second drink. “But that’s enough about work! It’s taken over my life enough as it is. How about you, Lucille?”

Suddenly even shier than usual, Lucille couldn’t think of anything to say except, “How did you know my name?”

Kellyn did a double take, then started to contemplate the question, as if he had forgotten the answer himself. “Oh… your boss, Rudi Larkspur, he talked about the mountain on the news, right? I have to admit, I was a little confused about the crevasses.”

Lucille flinched.

“Sorry. Let’s not talk about work, yeah?” Kellyn quickly salvaged the situation. “So have you always lived in Snowbank?”

“No,” Lucille replied, her mouth turning up into a weak smile. “I come from Zhery. It’s quite far away.”

“Never heard of it,” Kellyn confirmed cheerfully. “Then again, you probably haven’t heard of Almia either.” He chuckled amicably.

And so, Kellyn became like a breath of fresh air in Lucille’s life. As conditions gradually worsened at work, with failure after failure impeding her progress with memory transfer, Lucille grew to be in need of something else to go home to. Although she refused to resent Viktor, she no longer knew if she could trust him, and miserably admitted that the closeness between them didn’t exist anymore.

Instead, Lucille would meet up with her new friend Kellyn at the pub in central Silverport, overlooking the park where her life had changed all those months ago.

At first, they would stick to safe topics of conversation – Kellyn talked enthusiastically about sunny Bealbeach City, and the small region of Almia where he had begun his career. Lucille discovered a happiness she hadn’t felt in a while in talking about Inhore City and Zhery. Gradually, she began to open up to Kellyn about her life at TAPCO, and having someone to confide in about Larkspur’s draconian oversight was the only thing keeping her head above water some days.

“I wish more than anything to return to Zhery,” she would say on particularly hard nights.

Each time, Kellyn would gently urge her not to give up, telling her he saw the amazing passion she had for her work.

She never saw his insistence as having any ulterior motive, though he was very good at hiding it. He saw that Lucille didn’t seem to have much interest in romantic relationships, but even that couldn’t stop him falling hard.

“I’m so tempted to drop everything and leave,” she told him again, one stormy winter night in July, when rain lashed so hard against the tavern windows they had to raise their voices to hear each other.

“Larkspur has used my radiation discovery to produce this capture styler…” she began miserably, and Kellyn’s attention was immediately sparked. “He calls it a stylus.”

“What a tosser,” Kellyn said cautiously.

“There’s no emotional connection at all,” Lucille mumbled. “The stylus brainwashes pokemon with radiation. They’re totally helpless to resist his commands.”

For weeks, Kellyn had been no closer to solving the mystery of the hostile wilds. There could be something for him here.

However, he cast his work aside. Lucille was the priority.

“Lucille, that’s terrible,” he said to her, motioning to the bartender to bring them another drink. “You’re too good of a person to be caught up in this. But you can use that to your advantage. You obviously care, so show him up! There must be something we can nail him on. Something even Interpol can’t ignore. You want to fight for a cause?”

“Not particularly,” Lucille said, stopping herself from shrinking back.

They both knew the next line of the song. _Then go out and fall in love._

Kellyn shook himself. “Sorry. That might be too much to ask. But if you ever want to look into it, I’ll use whatever connections I can to help you. Don’t give up.”

Lucille stared at her friend. She stayed lost in thought for a very long time. Then she suddenly said, with a steel edge in her voice which Kellyn had never heard before, “Okay. I’m going to stay, and I’m going to try to expose him.”

Kellyn’s face creased into a smile, and he almost reached out to hug her. He stopped himself.

“Life may not be easy,” Lucille said. “But, you’re right. I have to stand for something.”

With this in mind, Lucille began attacking her work with a new determination. She worked furiously to perfect her memory transfer technology – by month’s end she was able to capture electrical signals from her pokemon’s brains with startling efficiency, and transfer those into the brain of a target. However, these transfers only contained random snapshots of the original’s memory – she had still not found a way to extract the complete dataset which would enable duplication of a whole identity.

During the dead of night, when the desolation helped tame her significant fear, Lucille began to investigate the work underway behind the dividing wall in her shed. Windowless and locked by card key 24/7, Lucille realised the lab would only be accessible via the dividing wall itself.

She began by removing a laser from one of the spare units in the spectroscopy lab. These were Class 4 instruments – more than capable of burning through the flimsy wooden wall. Pulling along the laser’s sizeable power supply, Lucille transported the contraption to her shed on a tarp-covered trolley.

Using goggles to protect her eyes meant it was impossible to see the laser beam, so Lucille attached a steel rod to the end of the laser to guide her when making the cut. Turning the laser to low-power pulsed mode, so as to avoid scorching the wood, Lucille worked into the early hours of the morning cutting a neat, virtually invisible, square window out from the edge of the dividing wall.

That first night, she couldn’t drum up the courage to open the window and take a look, so settled with stealthily returning the laser.

The next day, she tried to continue with her work as normal, but she had grown curious despite herself. She forced herself to concentrate on the problem at hand - memories - but this was a difficult task. She was in quite a state by the time Viktor came to visit her in the shed around lunchtime. Like her, he was becoming increasingly strained emotionally, and had finally swallowed his pride and returned to plead for her companionship.

“Larkspur jumped me in my lab the other day,” he said, laughing nervously, seemingly keen to get it off his chest.

“I swear I saw my life flash before my eyes.”

Lucille stared at Viktor.


	8. Chapter 8

Life suddenly sped up to a blur, again.

Lucille’s two lives ran steadily in parallel: the steadfast, loyal scientist, unstoppable ever since Viktor’s comment had sparked an idea in her head, pushed out breakthrough after breakthrough during the day, and at night the person she no longer recognised as herself would carefully remove the wedge of wood burned in the dividing wall, observing the progress which had taken place beyond.

The turning point in Lucille’s research had been the realisation that she could force important memories to the surface by introducing a large enough shock to the brain. This was done under sedation so the unconscious specimen would not be harmed; the effect occurred as long as critical subconscious pathways remained functional. As she’d mentioned to Viktor once, it was difficult to test for episodic memories in a pokemon, so she judged her success by carefully observing the relationships between the various Sheebits, which she’d come to know well enough for the job.

And, against all odds, it worked. The cloned Sheebits behaved affectionately with the friends of their originals, and disliked Lucille’s handling if their originals were so inclined.

She was really running short of space now; however, the need to expand provided her with the perfect excuse to spend all night in the shed, building new enclosures and reshuffling the existing ones.

The things she saw while doing so were truly fearful, but then again most new things are.

The first time Lucille slid the wooden square out of its hold, using an adhesive-tipped rod to draw it slowly towards her, she almost had a heart attack on the spot. Exceedingly bright light flooded her vision, and it took several seconds of adjustment for her to realise the lab beyond was empty, and there was no need for the panic which had taken her over.

She never once put her head through the window, for fear of being caught on CCTV. However, what she could see from her vantage point was more than sufficient; she was afforded an unrestricted view of the whole workshop. The space contained five lab benches arranged in parallel, stacked to the roof with machines and bottles of reagents. Underneath these were blue cabinets for the acids, and yellow ones for the flammable organics – most of the lab was remarkably ordinary.

What made Lucille’s skin prickle was the large machine in the corner – she recognised it as a bio-incubator, like the ones she often used to develop her cloned Sheebits. An eerie green haze surrounded the machine, as if what lay within pulsed with luminescence. Lucille knew of no pokemon which naturally displayed such a feature.

She realised with a start that this must have been the source of the radiation which had tamed her Sheebits. Recently, some of the pokemon had begun to lose their dazed countenance, and their personalities had altered once more – they had become aggressive and extremely temperamental, and Lucille measured an elevated body temperature, though they did not seem otherwise physically ill.

As part of her re-organisation of the shed, Lucille was moving the cages as far away from the dividing wall as she could. She observed the subdued Sheebits gradually regaining their usual alertness and vigour, but, unfortunately, the ones which had reached the next stage of radiation damage showed no improvement. She had taken to wearing thick gloves to handle them after one scratched her arm, leaving a strange burn which took several weeks to heal. Kellyn had doodled on the bandages.

One day, when the wound was finally starting to seal, Viktor came by Lucille’s office to congratulate her on the publication of her latest paper, which contained details of her memory transfer process.

“Thanks for the note,” Viktor told her with a smile, referencing the section where she’d mentioned the inspiration for her work.

“Of course,” Lucille mused, her face creasing up with concern as she noticed his sunken eyes. He seemed to have lost weight. “How are you holding up?” she asked at last.

“Fine,” Viktor said quickly. “Larkspur has us pumping papers out. I’m just tired.” His laugh was weak.

The realisation hit Lucille that she often went days without seeing Viktor on site. The next time she visited his office, she noticed his desk had acquired a layer of dust.

It was around this time that Kellyn began clamming up about his work too. Just as Lucille had started to settle into a comfortable routine, everything seemed about to turn on its head again, and this made her dive further into the protective confines of her shed. Some evenings, she even declined to meet with Kellyn, but though he was reluctant to talk about work, he seemed more enthusiastic than ever to be close to her.

“Lucille, come back to Bealbeach with me,” he proposed one balmy night in spring when the weather was starting to turn. He’d finally coaxed her into a long overdue meeting, and he wasn’t going to let the moment pass him by, lest he never got another. “I’ll help you find work. Get you out from under this pressure.”

Lucille laughed lightly, not bothering to hide her puzzlement at this reversal of stance. “I thought you wanted me to stay.”

Kellyn knew he had to come clean eventually. “Lucille, I’ve never met anyone like you,” he told her earnestly. “I suspect I’ve fallen in love with you.”

Lucille was somewhat shocked. To be honest, she hadn’t noticed, and that innocence endeared her even more to Kellyn.

“Really?” she replied.

Kellyn started to chuckle. “Really.”

Lucille looked at him properly for the first time in a long time. She noticed the chiselled lines of his face, but only gave them a fleeting glance, drawn instead to the honesty and kindness in his eyes. She didn’t stop him when he leaned forward to kiss her.

“I don’t know what’s going on up there on the mountain, but I’ve done you wrong to throw you into it. I have to return to Bealbeach in the summer – please come with me.”

Lucille, overwhelmed by everything which was happening, fell into Kellyn’s arms, imagining that they might be able to give each other constancy. She committed herself to letting him stay in her life, and she went to bed with him that night.

In the morning, mental clarity rose with the sun and, back in her shed, Lucille realised that she would be hopelessly lost without this place and her life’s work, and it broke her heart. Stubborn as she was though, she refused to let the commitment she’d made out of her mind. As everything spiralled out of control around her, as Viktor grew sicker, more absent, and descended further in denial, as the radiation in the shed grew so strong her relocated Sheebits began to succumb again to its effects, she realised a commitment was something which never had to change, as long as she didn’t let it.

Lucille began tying up loose ends at TAPCO that very month, and it was in doing so that she ultimately discovered the most compelling reason that she could not leave Silverport Town. Not then, and maybe not ever.


	9. Chapter 9

Endings are rarely as cathartic as they’re made out to be.

Lucille tried hard to convince herself that her research at TAPCO had reached a well-rounded node, that any self-respecting scientist would have been delighted to take on a new direction with their work at this point, having opened up a fresh new field and finished laying down its cornerstones. For a transition moment in her career, there really couldn’t have been a more perfect time.

She was disappointed when the satisfaction which should come with such a realisation obstinately eluded her.

Still, she continued finishing the last of her planned experiments, publishing all the data she had intended to, and organising the handover of her Sheebit lab to a colleague. On the down-low, she implored him to prepare the pokemon for life in the wild and to shut down the facility. Even to Lucille, it was unclear if she did this out of concern for the pokemon’s radiation exposure, or whether she just couldn’t bear the pain of relinquishing control of the place to another person.

It was during what would have been one of her final late nights in the shed, that life was turned upside down once more.

Her assistants having long gone home, Lucille stood alone with her pokemon and her thoughts in the dead of TAPCO’s night. She shut her eyes and breathed in deeply, swearing she would really commit the smell to memory this time… Gentle humming from the synchrotron and huge FNR complex provided an almost lulling backdrop to her reverie.

And they were the only sounds, until a burst of static from the corner of the shed caused her eyes to fly open.

What was that?

There was nothing in the corner except the memory transfer setup, a mass of wires protruding from a sort of helmet which had been adapted to fit the head of a Sheebit. The two pointy ear sleeves erupted in another shower of sparks, and Lucille blinked several times, as if trying to clear a fog from her head.

Walking cautiously over to the contraption, she noticed that the activity was coming from the ‘receiver’ helmet, the one which captured memories. The ‘transmitter’ helmet, the one which transferred those thoughts to the target, remained still.

A thought struck Lucille as if she had been electrocuted. She had always used these instruments to manipulate memories… but what were memories, aside from thoughts which evoked images and emotions? What was stopping her invention from being used to communicate plain thoughts?

You’re mad, she scolded herself, as she went to pick up the transmitter helmet. You’re going to kill yourself.

Poor Lucille just couldn’t seem to let her research go.

She placed the transmitter helmet on her head, reasoning to herself that she’d had the electronics designed to deliver very low currents, which even the small bodies of Sheebit would not be harmed by.

Lucille gasped as the receiver helmet lit up again and a powerful image forced itself into her mind, momentarily disorientating her. Bright lights and the silhouettes of three people, distorted through some kind of screen. Intense fear took her over, a strange combination of fear, confusion, and hope. Were these her feelings? She ripped the transmitter off her head.

As she regained her bearings, Lucille stared at the receiver helmet lying unoccupied on the bench. All her Sheebits were asleep, or seemed to be, and there wasn’t a bright light in sight. She forced the rising fear back down her throat.

It was then that she heard the beeping. A sound she had heard hundreds of times before – the sound a bio-incubator made when its cover was opened.

Rushing to press her ear against the dividing wall, Lucille could hear faint footsteps as people walked across the linoleum floor on the other side. She also heard the faint buzzing alarm of her radiation monitor, forcing her to stagger back from the wall to safety. The moderately elevated radiation level shouldn’t have made her nauseous, but she felt a wave rise up inside her regardless.

She wasn’t sure what drove her to it, but the next thing she did was put the transmitter helmet back on.

Prepared for the unsettling sensation this time, Lucille leaned back against the shed door and let the thoughts from the receiver take over from her own.

The distorting screen – it must have been the bio-incubator cover – no longer tarnished the image, and Lucille could clearly see three scientists in bulky radiation suits. Their faces were obscured by masks, but she recognised the tall one with the strange gait as Rudi Larkspur. A thought entered her head – a sensation of revulsion as Larkspur leaned down to prod and poke her with various instruments. She felt the pain in her body.

“This is remarkable,” Larkspur said to his colleagues. “It’s still running on fuel from July.”

Four months ago.

“What can the FNRs manage, Hen?” he continued.

“On this much? Three weeks tops,” Hen Rodriguez replied, his voice muffled by the walls of the incubator.

“Four,” said the third scientist, punching numbers into a calculator. “We got new data today.” Lucille gasped of her own accord; this was Viktor’s voice.

“Never mind those trivialities,” Larkspur boomed. “You beauty!” He looked down towards Lucille (or, rather, whatever was in the bio-incubator). “This energy density is off the charts, even for high-grade uranium…”

Lucille felt the creature’s apprehension spike again as Larkspur leaned down to conduct more tests. It was obviously confused and terrified – it didn’t understand anything the scientists were saying or doing, though Lucille did. She realised that, if what Larkspur said was true, the specimen might well be capable of producing signals strong enough to jump the dividing wall and air gap and reach Lucille’s receiver helmet.

As the minutes ticked past, Lucille felt her sympathy for the creature’s predicament start to rip her apart. No longer consumed by mere curiosity, she yearned to reassure the pokemon, as she was sure it must have been. Removing the transmitter from her head, Lucille turned its power output up to the maximum setting, hoping that would be enough to jump the barrier. She then pulled the receiver as far from the dividing wall as she could before putting it on, and concentrated hard to clarify her thoughts.

Looking outwards from the shed door, Lucille panned her gaze over the dimly-lit canteen, the gleaming synchrotron, and the car park. _There’s another world out here, and there are good people who don’t want to hurt you._

A sudden ruckus from the other side of the dividing wall had Lucille diving for cover under one of the Sheebit cages, tearing off the receiver and sending it careening across the floor back towards the memory transfer station.

“It’s gone berserk!” Hen shouted, his voice faintly audible.

“Take the fuel core!” Viktor roared, as a series of loud crashes ensued and a strange mechanical whining rose in intensity.

Abruptly, the commotion died down as quickly as it had started, and Lucille fought to regain her breath. The three men in the other room were talking amongst themselves, but the murmurs which reached Lucille were too quiet for her to make out any words. She crawled over to the transmitter helmet, but only pitch blackness came through when she put it on. She listened hard but heard only the frantic buzzing of her radiation monitor.

And so, Lucille waited there in the shed, exhausted and frightened, until Larkspur, Viktor, and Hen Rodriguez finally left the lab, carrying their radiation suits. She waited until the last of them had driven away before cautiously emerging. It was well past two o’clock in the morning.

She never remembered dragging herself to her office and falling asleep at her desk.

Waking to someone shaking her shoulder gently, Lucille looked groggily around the familiar and very normal room, stuffed full of musty piles of paper, morning sun streaming in through the window, a corner of lush garden visible past the glare.

“Hey,” Viktor said softly. “Sorry to wake you up.”

Lucille shook her head until the fog cleared, and a heavy silence settled over the office. Viktor had brought her a coffee, which she politely declined.

“Is everything okay?” he began, awkwardly setting the cup down atop a folder. “Sasha just told me you’re giving him the Sheebit lab.”

Lucille didn’t say anything, and watched the cogs turn in Viktor’s mind.

“Oh…” he said at last, his face falling. “You’re leaving TAPCO.”

“I most certainly am not,” Lucille finally said, making up her mind and satisfied with having had a go at him. “Actually, I meant to ask you for a radiation suit today. It’s not safe for me in the shed anymore.”

He flinched visibly. “I’m… sorry,” he managed. “I can organise that for you.”

“Why would you be sorry?” Lucille asked, painting amicable concern across her face. She was shocked by her own audacity.

Viktor looked uncomfortably at his feet. “I meant, I’m sorry you’re having problems.”

Lucille laughed bitterly. She wasn’t such a good actor after all.

Nevertheless, Viktor waited patiently for her to tidy herself up, then walked with her to the Sheebit shed as if nothing was wrong. They were greeted by Cedric Parker as he left the canteen, and by this point the tension between them had reached such a level that they both jumped at the sight of him.

The tension neared breaking point as Viktor tested the air in the shed in total silence. Even the subdued pokemon offered no reprieve. “Oh my God,” was all he could say at last. “Oh my God. Lucille, why didn’t you say something sooner? I imagine you’ve been in grave danger a long time. Radiation doesn’t reach these kinds of levels overnight.”

Except in the case of a runaway, Lucille thought viciously. Viktor was lying through his teeth.

“I’ll organise a clean-up immediately. You can borrow a suit from the FNR safety department if you can’t avoid coming, but please try to stay away if you can, at least for a couple of weeks.”

Lucille didn’t doubt the concern in his eyes was genuine, but he was delusional if he thought that meant anything anymore.

So, she stayed on at TAPCO, but she didn’t stay for Viktor. She stayed for the hapless pokemon he spent many nights experimenting on with Larkspur, a pokemon she worked inhumanly long hours building two-way ‘transceiver’ helmets to communicate with, a pokemon which came to know and trust Lucille and which she came to care for fiercely, though they never once laid eyes on each other.

Having never heard the pokemon referred to as anything other than “it”, or, once, “092”, Lucille began affectionately calling it “Uranium”, or “Urane” for short. She showed it whatever pleasant memories she could dredge up, of Silverport Town, Inhore City, or anywhere in between. Urane had nothing to show her in return, except its bleak view from within the bio-incubator. However, Lucille was almost brought to tears one day when Urane presented to her an imagined scene, of itself and Lucille (a vague human-shaped being) travelling through the routes of Zhery.

Kellyn had been crestfallen when Lucille announced her decision to stay in early December, but they vowed to maintain their relationship with regular visits, and a conversation every day on the phone. Kellyn was growing to realise that work would always come first for Lucille; he couldn’t change that, no matter how hard he tried. And why should he? She wouldn’t be his Lucille any longer if she really did drop everything for him.

Anyway, as it turned out, their long distance plans never needed to come to fruition. Kellyn’s departure for Bealbeach was also delayed indefinitely when, a couple of weeks before the end of his assignment, he suffered a break-in at his temp office in Snowbank Town. The thief made off with his finished reports about the situation on Mount Lanthanide and Route 16, reports he had been purposefully hiding from Lucille for months. Reports which would cause mass and needless panic if released to the public, and which would almost certainly land either himself or Rudi Larkspur in prison, depending on whose hands they had fallen into. 


	10. Chapter 10

The Silverport property market crashed on a Tuesday.

It began the same day Lucille found out she was pregnant, several months after the robbery. Throwing up her breakfast, she began to seriously consider seeing a doctor for radiation poisoning, when she realised that, distracted by her hectic work life, she hadn’t even realised she was over a month late.

She did the test, and that was that. Kellyn was thrilled; Lucille, less so.

That afternoon, the East Tandor stock market and property prices in Silverport and Snowbank began inexplicably to tumble. It was only half a percent a day at first – no worse than a normal reaction to some gloomy economic data. However, the downwards pressure was relentless, and very soon, losses were totalling half a percent an hour, and people were starting to talk.

Lucille’s neighbour, the elderly woman with the estate, moved out inside the week, saying her doctor had heard from his lawyer that bad news was coming, something which might force a mass evacuation from the island.

A fortnight later, the news finally hit the stands, and all chaos broke loose.

Kellyn Friedmann, heading a special task force from the Tandor Ranger Network, had discovered dangerous levels of ambient radiation in the wilderness on Mount Lanthanide, which was causing abnormal behaviours in wild and trainer pokemon alike. Locals were advised to avoid all ground transport between Silverport and Snowbank while investigations continued, especially travel off the marked road on the mountain.

It was 23rd May 2001.

After those who had been privy to insider information, the families were the first to leave. By mid-June that year, shops lay derelict and abandoned in both towns, and whole streets of houses sat empty, some scattered with furniture and personal effects which had been left behind in the rush.

The towns’ mayors tried desperately to salvage the situation, reminding residents that as long as they remained within built-up areas, they would be safe. They even trialled a tax incentive to attract people to stay in the region, but by the time council budgets were finalised at end of financial year, it was clear that this had been an outright failure. In fact, it had had the opposite effect, creating panic by showing up the severity of the crisis.

By mid-August, both mayors had resigned, and the populations of Silverport and Snowbank had more than halved in less than six months.

Only TAPCO Larkspur, situated on the slopes outside Silverport Town, continued to flourish, with the first pilot fast neutron reactors reaching deployment readiness and being shipped to Epsilon Power Plant off the coast of West Tandor. The new reactors would be used to generate either electricity or low-pressure process steam from spent fuel currently in storage at Epsilon.

While the world turned and crumbled around them, Lucille and Kellyn ran into turbulence of their own.

“We have to get out,” Kellyn would say. “You can’t stay here. I have a place back at HQ; we could leave tomorrow.”

Each time, Lucille would refuse, saying she took adequate protective measures at work and radiation levels were still normal on site, including in the Sheebit shed now that Urane was calmer.

“Whatever’s happening on the mountain, it isn’t related to my work,” she would reply, infuriating Kellyn.

“You’ve got to start thinking about the child,” Kellyn said a lot. “You’re too close to Route 16 up there.”

“I didn’t imagine you would get caught up in hysteria,” Lucille would say sourly. “Why didn’t you tell me last year if you were so concerned?”

“I didn’t want to scare you!”

“Oh, but you’re trying now.”

“I knew it would look like I was pressuring you to quit your job.”

“Didn’t I deserve to know?”

“It was very sensitive information! I didn’t want to break any laws.”

“So that’s it?” Lucille would retort. “Because I work at TAPCO, you thought I would tell Larkspur the rangers were onto him? Is that who you think I am?”

“No!” Kellyn would protest, but he was out of objections. Lucille would win these arguments every time, because she was right. They always ended the same way.

“I’m sorry,” Kellyn would say. “I should have trusted you. But we need to think about the child now – this isn’t just about you and me anymore.”

By September, Lucille was clearly pregnant, and every time he saw her, Kellyn would worry. However, Lucille’s stubbornness kept her from abandoning the pokemon Urane, and their relationship grew increasingly strained. Kellyn never threatened to leave, instead silently suffering through his anxiety. Lucille’s heart grew heavy watching him hurt, but she could never show that either, because to show compassion would have forced her to leave Silverport for Kellyn’s sanity.

She brought him along to work one day, in an attempt to show him how safe the equipment was, but he was still unsettled.

By the end of the month, they both doubted whether they could make it through another week. Not wanting to see Kellyn waste away waiting for her, Lucille prepared herself to end the relationship, because she loved him enough to let him go, give him another chance to be happy. She didn’t know what she would do with the child, but imagined she would give custody to Kellyn.

The day she planned to have the conversation, Viktor Kuritsyn called her into a meeting with himself and Larkspur. Lucille almost feigned sickness – she was truly feeling quite ill. But she dragged herself up to the top of the synchrotron in the end.

“Dr Mayer,” Viktor began unfeelingly, and Lucille almost cried when she considered how far apart they had drifted. “I’m sure you are aware we now have three pilot FNRs installed on Epsilon Island by Bealbeach City.”

Lucille nodded. This was old news.

“Larkspur and I have made tremendous progress on a new type of reactor, no. 092, which I may have mentioned to you previously.”

“Yes,” Lucille said miserably.

“Its development has reached completion,” Viktor said, and Lucille felt a stab of fear in her chest for Urane. “We’ve held lengthy discussions about the best option moving forward, as we await settlement of a contract for its purchase, which may take several years.”

Larkspur had started the conversation with a frown, and it was souring by the minute.

“We've decided that holding it near a source of fuel – it takes the same as an FNR – in some kind of stasis mode will be in the company’s interests. This would, of course, take place on Epsilon Island, with any engineers involved to be based in Bealbeach City.”

Lucille looked up for the first time.

“I have wholeheartedly endorsed you for the job, Dr Mayer,” Viktor said, his face inscrutable. “Your significant expertise in the fields of radiation, genetics, and electronics will be a great asset to the project.”

Larkspur, unable to contain himself, growled, “I told you this was a bad idea, Viktor. Look, she hasn’t said a thing this whole time. That hole in the dividing wall – she knows all about 092.”

The blood drained from Lucille’s face.

“Listen to yourself talk,” Viktor said. “How could she possibly have made that? I already told you, I ordered that cut to be made during construction, so we could bring extension leads through from the generator. It’s been sealed ever since.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Larkspur snapped back, but it seemed a truce had been reached.

Lucille fought back tears. She couldn’t understand why Viktor was defending her. She gave him a grateful look, but he stared back as if his face was made of stone.

That night, Lucille had a very different conversation with Kellyn than the one she’d been planning in the morning. Kellyn, naturally, was thrilled with the news, and Lucille was overjoyed to see him smiling again – it was the best feeling in the world. This job had solved all their problems. They would relocate to safe Bealbeach City within two weeks, and Lucille would still be able to work with Urane.

“Viktor Kuritsyn, he did this for us,” Lucille murmured, and Kellyn never forgot that.

Lucille met with Viktor the day she was due to leave. Her little office in the corner of the ICP lab had been cleared, and she had a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach looking over it. This place where she’d spent so many years of her life, so many late nights, hour upon endless hour writing and reading papers. She ran a hand over the battered wooden desk, uncharacteristically large now it was no longer piled with documents, and even at that moment, she wished somehow that she might be able to stay.

“Lucille?” her assistant called her. “The front office is about to close.”

She had to sign out and hand in her key card.

Carrying her final box of belongings, Lucille signed her old life away at the reception, and walked out of TAPCO Silverport for the very last time.

Viktor was waiting by her car.

“Lucille,” he began, not sure where to put his hands. “I… I just want to say, it’s been a pleasure working with you the past ten years.”

“Likewise,” Lucille said feelingly. There was so much she wanted to clear up, but this was neither the time nor the place.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” Viktor said, and Lucille noticed with a shock that he suddenly looked old.  

Unable to stop her deep affection for her friend flooding back, Lucille blurted out, “Come with me, Viktor. Get out while you can.”

Viktor looked at her a long time. “I’ll be okay, Lucille,” he said at last. “Rudi and I get along now.” He gave her a weak smile.

Lucille didn’t need to say anything. Viktor let the truth out all on his own.

“Well,” he said eventually, his hands finally finding a comfortable spot. “That’s the official record. In truth, I guess I’m just not, and have never been, as strong as you are.”

"Take care of yourself too," she whispered back to him, her eyes brimming with tears.

She drove away without looking back.


	11. Chapter 11

Lucille wasn’t quite sure when exactly she decided to act.

Perhaps it was when the moving truck arrived, and she had to stack her life in cardboard boxes neatly into the back.

Perhaps it was as she started her car and followed the truck down the empty street, past looted houses, boarded-up shopfronts and uncollected rubbish.

Perhaps it was during the two ferry trips, the first to Venesi and the second to Bealbeach City, traversing the pirate-infested Maskara Channel under armed guard.

Perhaps it was even as Kellyn welcomed her with an embrace to her new home, and she had to peel her shirt from her back afterwards.

“You’ll get used to the humidity,” Kellyn said with a cheerful laugh, as Lucille sweated from every pore in her body. “Spring is a good time to break yourself in.”

Regardless of when exactly it happened, by the time she returned from the first trip to her new office on Epsilon Island, Lucille had decided to steal Urane from TAPCO.

The boat ride was miserable now she was six months pregnant, but she had to set up her lab before going on leave, and the longer she left it the worse it would get.

Epsilon Island was a pleasant enough place, hosting a grassy flat skirted by the sea, a spick-and-span power plant further inland with neatly asphalted roadways, and several exploration rigs chugging on the plains to the north.

The wind, heavy with its burden of moisture, clamped down on Lucille’s bare arms as she stepped off the boat, and she quickly hurried after Hen Rodriguez, who had been assigned to oversee Urane’s transfer.

“We’ll be working down here,” Hen said, deliberately looking at anything but Lucille. He led the way underground, passing through the power plant’s lobby and into a garishly lit stairwell sunk to the side of the building. Two flights down, the shaft opened out into a wide basement, two sturdy doors adorning the wall to the left.

Hen effortlessly slid the bolts on the first door.

“This used to be the safe room,” he spoke mechanically. Lucille stared longingly at the bunk beds. “There’s a new one further from the pools, that’s why there isn’t much left in here. We’ll set up our lab at the back.”

Lucille saw that a row of lab benches had already been anchored to the concrete floor, though they were sparsely furnished, and the smell of new plastic and bare plaster still lingered in the air.

“092 will stay there for now.” Hen pointed towards a bio-incubator in the corner, plugged into its own power source. “While we work on its stasis tank.”

Lucille feigned ignorance. “Tell me more about it.”

“I’ll tell you what I know. It’s a machine which concentrates energy from radioactive sources. Spent rods, unenriched uranium, you name it. It can produce high pressure steam from very low grade fuels.”

Lucille bit her lip to stay quiet.

“Think about it,” Hen said, his face showing some emotion – Lucille fancied she saw reverence – for the first time since they’d arrived. “No more enrichment. We might not even need yellowcake in the future.”

She couldn’t contain herself any longer. “If it’s a machine, why do you keep it in a bio-incubator?”

Hen shifted on his feet. “They're great for temperature and humidity control.”

“I see,” Lucille said acidly.

“Do you need to rest?” Hen asked quickly.

“No,” Lucille replied. There was a long silence.

“In that case, I’ll show you to your office,” Hen said at last.

Lucille lurched after him, her feet burning. He pretended not to notice. They left the lab bunker, and Hen locked the door behind them. “We’ll cut you a set of keys, of course,” he said, before shifting to the door on the right. This one had no sliding bolts, and opened easily with the swipe of a keycard.

They were greeted on entry by rows of largely empty shelf stacks, towering above their heads to graze the ceiling.

“Here,” Hen said, striding over to a cheap plastic desk wedged into the janitor’s closet. Its door was propped open, and a bare lightbulb cast harsh light on the white cinderblock walls. Lucille hurried to catch up, clipping the corner of a shelf and sucking up the pain.

“Sorry it’s a bit basic,” Hen said awkwardly. “This was an old store room; they’re still clearing everything out. Feel free to work in the lab if you don’t mind your stuff being out in the open.”

After a few seconds of painful silence, Hen started to chatter about his ideas for a stasis tank. His words snaked into Lucille’s head, and she sifted miserably through them for meaning. The things Hen said made no sense – they were wishful thinking. Lucille knew the only way to manipulate time, in their three dimensional world, was using gravity.

She gazed absently around the cavernous store room and tried to imagine her Sheebits wandering between the shelf stacks. She imagined herding them up two flights of stairs for a breath of fresh air.

A sudden noise startled both of them; Hen and Lucille turned their heads in the direction of the lab bunker.

The clamour died down after a minute or so, only to start up again a few seconds later.

“What’s going on?” Lucille ventured to ask.

“It must be the drills,” Hen said, quickly losing interest. “Cryogenics seems like a viable option then?”

Hen sighed as Lucille refused to answer his stasis tank question.

“They’re drilling a tunnel from one of the exploration shafts,” he elaborated, almost rolling his eyes. “It’s the only way we can bring the machine down here, without opening up the whole building. It’ll be finished by the end of the year; the transfer will happen after that.”

“Exploration for what?” Lucille asked.

“Uranium,” Hen said, irritated. He didn’t want to talk about the mine.

“And that’s going to be safe for us?” Lucille let some disdain creep into her own voice.

“The shaft was barren,” Hen snapped. “It’ll become part of the ventilation or access network, if they even bother using it.”

“Cryogenics won’t work,” Lucille said after another long silence. “You’ll damage the reactor’s structure.”

Hen waited for her to provide an alternative, but Lucille seemed to be done.

“I’ll bring my things over tomorrow,” Lucille said. “Then I’ll be back next year.”

“Of course,” Hen said, his face shifting into a barely detectible smile. “Congratulations again. I’ll get the keys to you.”

The boat ride back to the mainland was equally as grievous, but Lucille had her scheming to distract her this time. As she picked at her damp shirt, which the breeze was doing precisely nothing to help dry, she suddenly realised she had no intention of returning next year. She let the sight of the horizon release some tension from her body, then closed her eyes, blocking out the heat haze. She pictured the fresh greenery of TAPCO Silverport, even Inhore University… The thought of another big change sent a shock coursing through her, but she’d been desensitised enough by the move to Bealbeach that she didn’t rule the idea out altogether.

This transfer would be the only opportunity she had to cause an “accident” capable of claiming Urane, without having the blame laid on her. Nobody would bat an eyelid if she quit after being involved in what she envisioned. The child would be born by the new year, when Urane would be ready to travel. After all was done, she could flee to Zhery with the pokemon. With or without Kellyn and the baby. All of this would be behind her: no more power games, no more TAPCO. No more fear.

“Hey honey.”

Lucille’s head snapped up. The boat was docking.

She saw Kellyn standing in the crowd, his head turned towards the boat, but he hadn’t come to meet her. Along with four other rangers, he was struggling to shepherd the mass of protestors – Lucille saw their signs for the first time – away from the gangplank.

“No mines! No mines on our island!” they chanted as Lucille and the others disembarked.

“You should be ashamed!” someone shouted in Lucille’s face. “Do you want your baby to drink poisoned water?”

Red-faced, Lucille would not let herself stoop to the woman’s level. She pushed her way through the crowd, having lost sight of Kellyn.

After waiting a fruitless while for him beside the pier, Lucille caught the bus home alone. Kellyn’s city centre apartment was on the sixth floor; she felt slightly nauseous riding in the lift. She peeled at her shirt sleeves – the humidity, God the humidity was overbearing!

Those first few weeks, after she’d deposited all her research materials into the new office, Lucille would restlessly transition between watching daytime TV, despondently surveying the nearby strip mall from the kitchen window, and wolfing down entire packets of chocolate biscuits. Kellyn was rarely home; Lucille felt this much more keenly now that she had no job to go to herself. If it wasn’t for her biotech journal subscriptions, Lucille would’ve lost her mind.

Kellyn did his best to make it up to her in the evenings – he cooked dinner, massaged Lucille’s swollen feet, told her about who’d tried to shoot who on Redlight Street that shift, asked to hear about the latest biotech advancements so she could talk about her passion. They often discussed baby names.

“Vitor for a boy, Natalie for a girl,” was Kellyn’s enthusiastic fall-back.

“I like Arianne, it’s my grandmother’s name,” Lucille would say sometimes. She didn’t much care for Vitor either, but she had no better ideas.

The one topic they both avoided like the plague was Lucille’s work. Kellyn took the lead from her on this one. The only time it came up was when Lucille asked him for a high-quality Pokeball, which he was happy to provide. He suspected she didn’t really need it for her job, and felt guilty he couldn’t give her the companionship she missed during the day.

He felt particularly cruel putting a damper on Lucille’s enthusiasm for a holiday to Zhery, which she insisted on taking after the baby was born. Her parents, she said, were very excited to meet the child.

He had to remind her more than once that, for now, they just didn’t have the money to make the trip.


	12. Chapter 12

What’s a plan to fate?

Lucille started building her new future by quietly peer reviewing articles for the journals she read – the pennies she scraped together slaving her long, lonely days away were enough for two plane tickets to Inhore City.

She hinted to her parents to keep an eye out for job openings in Zhery, and made an effort to rekindle ties with her old university friends. Connections still counted for everything.

There was now just one final piece of the puzzle: she’d left the most tricky one till the end, but she needed all the concentration she could summon to pull it off. With each passing day, the discomfort of pregnancy irritated Lucille more, but she could not afford to waste time. The baby’s due date was the 3rd of January; Urane’s transfer had been scheduled for less than a fortnight after that.

Hen and Larkspur hadn’t found anything unusual in Lucille confirming her attendance.

“It’s just as much her project as ours now,” Hen said with a shrug.

The first thing Lucille did was make a recon trip into the newly completed tunnel. The door between tunnel and lab did not possess a lock: there was simply no need for it, with adequate security measures at both the bunker and shaft entrances.

“Hi Lucille, back so soon!” the receptionists had greeted her on her way in. Lucille had explained that she required unexpected access to some of her old experimental data – this was not a lie, as she was in the process of reviewing a paper related to her original cloning research.

The receptionists didn’t have to know she remembered her results with perfect clarity.

Lucille had heard from Hen the week before that the tunnel was complete – it was mid-December, all they needed now was the pulley to lower Urane down the shaft, and Lucille’s body had ballooned to the size and disagreeableness of a garbage truck. What should have been a one hour round trip stretched interminably into a four-hour marathon.

She began with checking that the tunnel was empty. Predictably, it was. If any class of people could be counted on to take a month-long holiday over Christmas, it was the residents of Bealbeach City.

Waddling down the long corridor, Lucille felt the musty smell of damp rock take her sharply back to the Sheebit shed. She squashed the pangs of nostalgia that rose inside her – there was no time for looking back now.

It turned out that she would be quite spoilt for choice. At various points along the tunnel, Lucille registered a padlocked cage full of acetylene cylinders, another with a generator and drums of diesel, and, finally, the stiff plastic hydraulic lines on the ceiling, running alongside the electrical cables which fed the strip lights.

She’d made up her mind before she even emerged back out from the tunnel.

Despite the exhaustion which was setting in, Lucille knew she had to finish the job then and there. Nobody would be foiled by a second trip of the eight-months-pregnant woman to Epsilon Island.

Luckily, Hen had been hard at work stocking up the laboratory. Lucille had prepared fall-back synthesis plans for the materials she needed, but she would’ve been the last to protest the direct availability of so many key chemicals.

The first thing she did, before her hands started shaking too much, was prepare the primers. She needed two – one for the initial diversion, and one for the main explosion. These consisted of a short length of copper wire, connected to a battery and radio-operated switch. Lucille had been able to find these components quite easily. The harder part was the preparation of the mercury fulminate, which required careful mixing of toxic mercury with concentrated nitric acid. Even this step was trivial compared to the final one: preparation of PETN for the booster charge. She’d found pentaerythritol, cutting an hour off her labour time, but the reaction between this and nitric acid and subsequent extraction of the product took far longer than expected.

Lucille was not one to give up.

She did what she always did – she blocked out the world. For a time, as if by some miracle, she even forgot about the child growing inside. It was just her and her work.

By the end of the day, Lucille had two finished detonators, and a large tube of crudely prepared ammonium nitrate emulsion. She placed this and one of the detonators in the top drawer of her filing cabinet, locking the door firmly. The other detonator she hid at a junction between the hydraulic and electrical lines in the tunnel – undetectable.

She smiled at her handiwork. The cables would both be shredded by the small explosion: what happened would be indistinguishable from an exposed wire meeting a leak in the hydraulic cable. This initial blast would be enough to cause a lot of smoke and chaos, and not much else. During this time, Lucille would pop the lid on Urane’s incubator, capture it using Kellyn’s Pokeball, and then set off the emulsion charge underneath it.

Nobody knew what Urane’s reaction would be to an uncontrolled environment – they would naturally assume they’d been very unlucky. Emulsion residue was smeared all over that tunnel from its recent blasting – a little extra would raise no suspicion. Lucille would take the pokemon, and go on holiday with Kellyn. She would put it to him there to raise their child in Zhery. If he didn’t bite, then he would survive without her.

Finally, the icing on the cake, nobody would hold it against her if she elected to leave TAPCO after being involved in such a terrifying accident.

Lucille was practically asleep on her feet when she arrived home that night. Kellyn, coming home still later, suffered not knowing the football scores so that he wouldn’t wake her where she had collapsed onto the sofa.

He watched her for a little while. His beautiful Lucille. Sighing, he closed his hand again around the engagement ring his mother had left him.


	13. Chapter 13

Kellyn proposed on Christmas day.

It was the first day of his holiday. (He’d become accustomed after years in Bealbeach to taking extra shifts during the summer, being one of the only people who made themselves available to do so.)

Lucille had woken up in an irritable mood – she seemed recently to have something weighing heavily on her mind.

“You should give those journals a break,” Kellyn would joke, though they both knew Lucille could not survive without work to do.

Kellyn prepared her favourite breakfast, waffles with whipped cream and strawberries, while Lucille struggled to straighten out each item of her clothing, twisting and re-twisting others in the process.

“The humidity’s better now, yeah?” he asked, in the sudden silence which followed the dying down of the kitchen fan.

Lucille didn’t think so, but she replied, “Yeah.”

They ate quietly, not sure what to say to each other.

Kellyn was the first to bite. “If anything’s wrong, you know you can tell me, right?” he said lightly. “I love a bit of problem solving.”

“I just dunno if I can do it,” Lucille mumbled.

Kellyn considered the stacks of papers which adorned the dining table.

“Sure you can,” he said. “This is all old hat for you.”

Lucille looked momentarily surprised. She considered his statement and the papers for a few seconds, before continuing.

“I’m worried something will go wrong. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Naw,” Kellyn replied. “You’re too smart for that. But isn’t there redundancy in these things anyway? If you don’t catch something, the others will.” He winked.

Lucille looked at his happy smile and bit her lip.

“Do you want to come feel the baby?” she asked, trying to give him something in return.

Kellyn laughed. He moved around the table and put his hand on Lucille’s belly. Little Vitor was kicking in there.

“He’s going to be great at footy. See that?” He let his hand fly off her belly, as if it had been booted by the child. “Oh damn. There’s a really big one coming.” Lucille’s mouth turned up, despite herself. Kellyn’s hand zipped up into the air, and he made a pained expression.

“No wonder that hurt. Look what he’s thrown us.”

Kellyn opened his fist, revealing the engagement ring topped with its chiselled red stone. Lucille’s breath caught in her throat.

“Doctor, Master, Professor Lucille Mayer,” Kellyn said with a big smile. “Will you marry me?”

Panic raced through Lucille’s mind. “Yes, of course,” she blurted out, “Officer, Detective, Ranger Kellyn Friedmann.”

It took Lucille all her effort not to break down and tell him everything right there. In her panic, she grabbed his face and kissed him passionately, buying herself some time. The feeling faded away.

“Let’s go do it, right now,” she said breathlessly, hoping to keep herself distracted.

“…Christmas day?” Kellyn raised an eyebrow.

Lucille screwed up her face. “Oh, right.”

It’ll be his choice, whether or not he stays in Zhery; she begged herself to listen to reason as the thoughts flooded back into her brain. He survived without me before, he can do it again.

The war in her mind didn’t grant her a moment of reprieve for the rest of the day, and she could barely say a word to him. Not during the cute picnic he set up on their bedroom floor, not during their evening stroll on the beach, and certainly not during Kellyn’s customary Christmas rerun of Love Actually.

"I love you," Kellyn told her at the end of the film.

"I love you too," Lucille forced herself to whisper. And she really did, in her own way, even if she didn't understand it yet.

Before going to bed, Lucille called her parents, who would just be waking up in Zhery.

“Happy Christmas,” she wished them. “Is it snowing?”

It was snowing.

“It's all white. You can’t see anything except the radio tower,” her mother said. Lucille closed her eyes and imagined it.

“The cats are sleeping in front of the fire. Your dad’s making gluhwein!” She laughed, and Lucille tried to stop herself missing them desperately. For ten years, she’d barely thought about her hometown. This was nonsensical.

Looking across the hall at the soft glow under the bedroom door, Lucille decided to place one more call.

Viktor was still awake, and picked up almost immediately.

“Happy Christmas, Lucille,” he said into the silence which Lucille had failed to fill. She tried to remove the huge lump from her throat, but two tears snaked out of her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She couldn’t stop the tide after that.

“Happy Christmas, Viktor,” she choked out.

It made no sense, but Lucille suddenly felt the greatest weight lift off her shoulders.

They didn’t exchange two more sentences before ending the call, but, as she crawled into bed beside Kellyn, she felt she had something concrete to hold onto for the first time in months.

Lost in busy, foreign Bealbeach City, Lucille had somehow forgotten the promise of the outside world.


	14. I come undone

The child came a week late.

Lucille's letters to Viktor began after their Christmas call. Like Kellyn had been a breath of fresh air when she lost trust in Viktor, Viktor now became Lucille's escape from the crushing pressure of her secret.

“I am very lonely,” she wrote at first. “The people in Bealbeach are so superficial. I don’t understand them, and they don’t understand me. I still cannot stand the humidity.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Viktor wrote back. “Things have changed so much in Silverport. I feel like any day now, I’m going to lose myself.”

Lucille confided in him about the baby and Urane, and Viktor talked extensively about the latest developments in Silverport Town. Larkspur had managed to achieve complete mind control of pokemon using a combination of radiation and serum. Lucille sensed that Viktor was no longer able to reconcile his involvement with his personal values, but he’d chosen his words very carefully, providing nothing which could be used against him.

He was quick to detract from mentions of Urane’s sentience.

“As for the reactor, it can give out rogue electrical signals. Don’t read too much into them,” was all he said.

Lucille went into hospital on the 3rd of January, and from then on it was a tense wait. Lucille worried about Viktor’s letters going to the apartment, but Kellyn didn’t seem averse when he gave them to her.

Eventually, early on the 10th, just as doctors were planning to give her the injection, the contractions started.

Lucille howled through a difficult labour, and Kellyn did his best not to flinch.

“You’re not even the one in pain,” Lucille snapped at him at one point.

When the baby finally came out, the doctor took it away for a clean and Lucille seemed to sag into the hospital bed.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” Kellyn asked, trying to mask his excitement as the doctor returned.

The doctor cleared her throat and gave the baby to Lucille.

“First of all, congratulations,” she said cautiously. “Secondly, were you given any screening tests during pregnancy?”

Lucille scowled. “Screening tests? For what?”

“The baby’s sex is… uh… indeterminate,” the doctor said. “I’d have to test to be sure, but I think he’s intersex.”

“What?!” Kellyn exclaimed. “What does that mean?”

The doctor motioned for Kellyn to sit down, and pulled up a chair beside the bed. “It means the child is biologically neither male or female. This isn't a problem in itself, but, of course, everyone would understand if you want to raise it as a girl or a boy – there are medical options to help you out there.”

There was a heavy silence.

“I’m so–“ Lucille began.

“Don’t you dare suggest there’s anything wrong with our child,” Kellyn broke her off with sudden feeling.

The silence deepened.

“I’ll leave you three to it,” the doctor said with a little smile. “The baby seems healthy, congratulations again. I’ll give you more information once I have it.”

Lucille held the baby and had a look at it. Despite what the doctor had said, she couldn’t get the image of her, pregnant, working with radiation and mercury, out of her head.

“So what do we do?” she said at last. “Pretend it's a boy?”

“Why?” Kellyn replied with conviction. “How ‘bout we let them decide when they’re older?”

“He’ll be bullied at school,” Lucille murmured.

Kellyn had nothing to say to that, because he knew it was true.

“So much for Arianne,” he said instead.

“What about Ari?” Lucille said. “That could go both ways.”

And so, Kellyn and Lucille’s child came into the world. Ari Mayer-Friedmann, born 10th January 2002.

It was as if Lucille had reached a truce with the world. The child, just trying to exist, was taunted from all quarters as Kellyn refused to give anyone a definitive answer about their gender. Lucille felt an all-consuming compassion she hadn’t experienced since last talking to Urane, and it seemed to free something that had been trapped inside her. She begged Kellyn to reconsider.

“They can be a Natalie,” Lucille said in desperation.

Kellyn replied, “Come on Lucille, you know that life doesn’t have to be easy…”

“But I have to stand for something,” Lucille mumbled, finishing the sentence.

A day and a half after Ari’s birth, Lucille took them home for the first time. The old lady who lived on the fourth floor was waiting for the lift, and was quick to coo and fuss over the baby.

“I shouldn’t get too close,” the woman said, stepping back. “I have a bit of a cold. What a lovely girl, though!”

Lucille looked at the child’s red blanket.

“It's not a girl,” she suddenly couldn’t stop herself from saying.

“Oh, I am sorry,” the old lady said after a pause. “It's so unusual to see a boy dressed all in pink.” She looked disdainfully at Lucille, as if she had committed some ultimate sin.

Lucille kept her mouth buttoned all the way up to the fourth floor.

“Good luck,” the old lady said as she stepped out, casting a wary eye towards the pram. Lucille wanted to punch her remaining teeth out.

“I’m glad Ari’s not your child,” she finally brought herself to say as the door was closing.

Kellyn had already returned to work, but he spent plenty of time looking at the baby when he got home in the evening. Lucille had already briefed him on the one day she had to be at Epsilon – that Friday, the 15th. Kellyn helped lighten the load as much as he could.

Before heading to bed that night, Lucille stood at the wardrobe and felt the two plane tickets she had purchased, hidden in the pocket of her winter coat. They would fly on the 22nd.

But in the end, it was all in vain.

On the Tuesday, only one day after coming home, Ari came down with a sniffle. Lucille bought them some Panadol, but their fever escalated relentlessly. By midnight, Lucille was standing in the hospital with Kellyn, watching their child fighting for life in intensive care.

“I’m very sorry,” their doctor told them. “I believe Ari’s contracted pneumonia. This strain is usually very weak, but he is only three days old.”

“Oh my god,” Lucille whispered. “That ratbag in the lift… I should never have taken them home.”

“It’s not your fault,” Kellyn stressed. “You couldn’t have known.”

The doctor told them not to get their hopes up, but by Wednesday morning, the fever had subsided with the help of strong antibiotics. Watching Ari being fed from a tube, Lucille couldn’t stop herself from crying, like she’d personally let the child down.

“Looks like you’ve been lucky!” the doctors told them. “She’s a fighter, this one.”

On Thursday, Ari came down with an aggressive stomach bug and their condition plummeted once again, to the shock of the doctors.

That afternoon, one of them broke the news to Lucille, who had not once left the hospital, even as Kellyn went off to work.

“I’m afraid it’s not good news,” the doctor said. “Ari has a serious immunodeficiency disorder.”

Lucille’s head spun. She hadn’t slept in over 24 hours.

“Really?” she whispered at last.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “That’s why the pneumonia bug got to him. The antibiotics saved his life, but opened him up to other infections.”

Lucille began to panic. She said the first thing which came into her head. “Will they be able to travel?”

The doctor stared at her as if she had sprouted an extra head. “Absolutely not. Your child is very sick, Dr Mayer. They might not be able to leave hospital for a long time. Months, maybe.”

“Are… are they going to die?” Lucille forced the words out of her throat.

“We’re doing everything in our power to prevent that,” the doctor said firmly. “It’s too early to give you a prognosis at the moment. But modern medicine can do wonders.”

That might have been so, but it sure didn’t come with a palatable price tag.

Lucille baulked when Kellyn showed her the first bill which had arrived in the mail.

“I’ve asked for nights and Sundays,” Kellyn said straight off the bat, his face set with a kind of steely intensity Lucille had never seen before.

Late on the Thursday, Kellyn insisted that Lucille go home and sleep while he stayed with the child. She protested at first, but in the end exhaustion won over and she allowed herself to be bundled into a taxi.

Arriving home, she lit a fire, though it was far too warm for one.

She threw the plane tickets into the flames.

Six months of stipends for peer reviewing journal articles. Whoosh.

The next one was a little harder. Lucille looked at the radio transmitter in her hand, and thought of Urane, alone and scared, probably coming off the ferry then in its insulated transporter.

Urane would live on. It needed her too, but for Urane, there would always be a tomorrow, another chance to make things right.

She threw the transmitter into the fire. Whoosh.

Lucille slept poorly that night, despite her considerable fatigue. On Friday, she made the trip to Epsilon Island, and met Hen Rodriguez and Rudi Larkspur coming off the boat. Urane’s transporter was lowered on a pulley into the reinforced mine shaft, and rolled along the tunnel to Lucille’s underground lab. She followed behind it, willing herself not to look at the junction where her detonator was still nestled.

That was the day Lucille saw Urane for the first time. She quietly observed its transfer to the bio-incubator through the face shield of her radiation suit, willing herself to stay calm. Urane was surprisingly small – its round body was a luminescent green, and it sported two appendages which might have functioned as arms, had they not been tied down.

“You will begin work on stasis immediately,” Larkspur instructed. “Forget your other research. Three bidders have reached the final stages of tender; this is now a matter of urgency.”

“May I talk to you about a pay rise?” Lucille asked miserably.

“It’s out of the question,” Larkspur barked. “Besides, am I not cutting your workload? How many projects were you working on before this?” He laughed nastily.

Kellyn arrived at the hospital at 3am on Saturday morning, wrecked from his shift, to find Lucille slumped in a chair by Ari’s bedside.

He fell into the neighbouring chair and put an arm around her, willing himself to sleep too. As he drifted off, he thought of Almia, and everything he, too, had left behind.

One always thinks that life in this world cannot get much harder, but one would be mistaken.


	15. Chapter 15

The next three years passed at a crawl.

Ari was in and out of hospital, scare after scare after scare.

"Most children with this disorder won't live past the age of three," doctors told Lucille. "That doesn't mean Ari won't. But you need to be prepared."

The bills kept stacking up, and by the end of 2002, the young family was staring bankruptcy in the face.

"I'll borrow money from my aunt," Kellyn said through gritted teeth. "Her husband was a banker. He left her a fortune."

"I'll ask my parents," Lucille said reluctantly. She hated to beg and scrape. How had everything fallen so far out of her control?

Work was hardly helping. Being cooped up in the Epsilon basement sucked all the life out of Lucille, and though the principles of gravity stasis were concrete, she just couldn't generate a strong enough, isolated field to achieve it. Centrifuging used drastic amounts of energy and didn't even come close.

Viktor played his part and chastised her on visits with Larkspur, who was of the opinion that mockery and psychological warfare were the best ways to encourage productivity.

"You'll have that pay rise once you get me a prototype," Larkspur would sneer. "You might be able to spend more time with your child then. How are they doing?"

Lucille steadfastly ignored his attacks, but it was a constant battle.

Viktor's letters stopped coming soon after. Lucille, refusing to believe she'd lost her only friend, sent three a few weeks apart; each time they came home marked 'return to sender'. Lucille tried one without a return address. She never found out what became of it.

By the time Ari turned two, the stress had broken Kellyn down.

Each night when he came home, if he came home, he collapsed onto the couch so as not to disturb Lucille. She would find him like that in the morning, and creep out for a bakery breakfast, so as not to wake _him_ up. Weeks went by. Days, weeks, months; it was like they'd both given up, but so long as they didn't hear it from each other, it couldn't be true.

Kellyn worked his endless night shifts, Lucille commuted to Epsilon Island every morning, and in the evenings they'd both visit Ari and tell them everything they could about their lives, their jobs, and the outside world. Lucille listened to Kellyn's stories, though they were never addressed to her, and had to bite on her lip to keep herself from despair. Truth be told, she had no idea what Kellyn did with himself anymore, but she knew he had started drinking again.

 _Talk to me_ , she would whisper sometimes, poised in the dark over his sleeping body.

Affairs at Epsilon worsened. Larkspur's client pulled out of the deal 18 months in, citing a "change of mind". Despite the hefty non-refundable deposit lining his coffers, Larkspur became touchier than ever, barking at Lucille that she'd better be keeping the details of her work under wraps.

"We need this tank. Stat!" he would shout. "Who knows how long it'll be before we find another buyer."

Lucille took a gamble during one of these ear-bashings. "I need some of my old equipment from Silverport. Could you have it sent over for me?"

Larkspur sniggered rudely. "That shit in the shed? Good, it would've cost us thousands to dump or incinerate."

Within a week, Lucille was once again in possession of her memory transfer plant, which she set up beside Urane's incubator. The first time she put on the helmet and felt Urane's thoughts thread between her own, she almost broke down then and there. Although she wasn't sure the pokemon could understand, she told it everything she could no longer find a way to say to Kellyn or Viktor.

Hen Rodriguez caught sight of her once or twice, leaning against the side of the bio-incubator in her suit and winged helmet, peering down and talking quietly. He said nothing.

The week after that, the old detonator in Lucille's filing cabinet exploded. Lucille was in her office at the time, and just about hit the ceiling in fright. It took her several minutes just to find the keys, and another five to wipe down the residue which had been blown all over the inside of the drawer. Hen Rodriguez had heard the bang and come to investigate, and saw her shoving the remaining ammonium nitrate canister into a plastic bag. Again, he said nothing.

On the way home, Lucille threw the bag off the side of the ferry. Weighted with rocks from the nearby overburden dump, behind which the new uranium mine was taking shape, the bag sank quickly and the other passengers were none the wiser.

Not long afterwards, Lucille began to tell Ari about Urane. "He's a pokemon, just like the Cocarans and Wingulls we have around here," she would say. "But there's only one of him, and he's a bit more powerful."

The child was curious despite their sickness, and one day presented Lucille with a labelled drawing - a green circle with arms, a head, and a halo. 'URAYNE', the caption said in wobbly green crayon. Lucille smiled fondly at the misspelling. _I'm going to miss you_ , she found herself thinking, and the realisation that she'd resigned herself to Ari's death hit her like a freight train.

In the end, the solution to the stasis tank came from Urayne. It often replayed conversations between Larkspur, Hen, and Viktor, hoping that they might be of some use to Lucille.

"So I heard some kid trainer tamed Dialga and Palkia in Sinnoh," Larkspur once sniggered. "Kids these days."

"Dialga and... What?" Hen asked, and Larkspur rolled his eyes.

"The legendaries, manipulators of time and space." Larkspur waved his hands about in a ghost-like motion and cackled. "What bullshit. It's a conspiracy if you ask me."

Lucille took inspiration and began searching for information about this Dialga and Palkia. Direct manipulation of time would be an easy solution, but, failing that, gravity was in effect the bending of the fabric of space. If the rumours were true, these pokemon could be the key.

Following a lengthy process of negotiation with the trainer, the government of Sinnoh, and the IAEA, Lucille put forward her entire project budget for the year, and managed to obtain a sample of active material from Palkia's gem. Little was known about its quantum properties, or how it would function removed from the pokemon, if at all.

Nonetheless, experimentation was in Lucille's blood, and given a biological focus she was once again in her element.

After 16 months of mockery from Larkspur, infuriated as he was by the way she'd chosen to use her funds, Lucille cracked the problem. Using Palkia's abilities and a gargantuan amount of electrical energy, she was able to generate a huge and confined dip in space which simulated the effect of a black hole on a vastly reduced scale.

A few mishaps did occur, during which equipment was crushed, and once Lucille herself came close to being drawn into the time slippage. But eventually, she worked out the boundaries and gradient of the field as a function of applied power, and built a casing for the device which would immunise the surroundings from its effect. The space between the so-called "crush zone" and the edge of the field became the stasis area, and, once defined, Lucille had the front of the tank replaced with strong corrosion-resistant glass. She placed a clock inside the tank and turned on the power. Time stopped.

"I can't believe this," Larkspur grumbled incessantly as he handed Lucille the contract for her pay rise.

She was ecstatic to share the news with Kellyn, momentarily forgetting the gaping rift which had opened between them. Unlocking the apartment door and seeing Kellyn, her face fell. She noticed for the first time the lines which now creased his brow, the graying of his hair around his ears. She noticed the tidiness of the apartment, the fully stocked fridge - things she'd taken for granted when she came home from work every day, lost in thought about stasis.

"Kellyn..." she said.

"I've got some good news," he said quickly.

"Me too," Lucille blurted out.

They stared at each other, trying to figure out who they'd become.

The news was cast aside. They went to each other and hugged for a long time. For the first time in years, Lucille let herself relax.

"It doesn't matter. Let's just say we'll be able to pay my aunt back soon," Kellyn said with a smile.

They talked for hours that night, about everything and nothing. Kellyn was home early as he had been promoted to an executive position with the Rangers - no more night shifts, far higher pay. Lucille talked about weird things she saw on the ferry, the mine, the wild pokemon on Epsilon Island. They both wished Ari was there with them.

And so a weight began to lift from Lucille's shoulders, just in time for her own Christmas miracle. She spent the morning with Kellyn, recreating their walk on the beach all those years ago, and Ari was well enough to leave hospital for the afternoon and join them for an ice cream. Lucille called her parents in the evening; they were hosting international homestay students in her absence, and everyone had broken into the gluhwein though it was only noon. Lucille smiled as she imagined it. There was only one thing missing from her perfect day now.

She dialled Viktor's number.

"The number you have called does not exist," a mechanical voice cut off the dial tone. "Tandor Mobile wishes you and your loved ones a happy-"

Lucille hung up, a strange feeling of loss in the pit of her stomach.

She didn't see Viktor again until the mine was commissioned in late January, 2006. 70% owned by TAPCO, the opening ceremony was attended by delegates from all branches of the company, including Viktor and Larkspur from Silverport. Lucille and Hen were unimportant, but invited by virtue of geographical convenience.

Lucille couldn't stop her tears when she saw Viktor standing beside Larkspur, a red company badge adorning the lapel of his suit jacket. He was obviously sick, having lost a lot of weight, his face lacking any semblance of healthy colour.

When the formalities were over, Lucille rushed over to him. He held out his hand to stop her, and they shook hands awkwardly. Lucille could see the fear he tried to hide behind his stoic facade.

"Do you want to see the stasis tank?" she asked.

Viktor looked to Larkspur, who nodded. "One hour," he barked, tapping his watch.

They caught the next shuttle bus to the power plant, and, shut in the privacy of Lucille's office, they both let down their guard. Lucille hugged Viktor so hard he was afraid his bones would snap.

"I'm sorry I never wrote back," Viktor blurted out. "Larkspur forced me to isolate you."

Lucille thought this a flimsy excuse, but she knew she had no idea what things were like in Silverport anymore. She nodded.

"How is Ari?" Viktor continued. "What about Kellyn?"

Lucille pointed to Ari's portrait of Urayne, blu-tacked onto the wall above her desk. Viktor smiled wanly.

"Best not let Rudi see that," he said. Lucille thought for a moment and took the picture down, putting it in the bottom desk drawer.

"Kellyn got a promotion," she changed the subject. "He's assistant chief now. They like anyone who can stick out 3 years of night shifts."

"He's a good guy, Lucille. You've done all right."

They had a glance at the stasis tank, so Viktor would have something to report. Urayne now floated inside, decked out in its transceiver helmet, a duplicate of Lucille's.

"He can still think?"

"Yes," Lucille said. "I don't know how it works, but the stasis seems not to affect its mind."

The tank hummed away, using up almost 5% of the energy produced by the power plant upstairs. Fuel rods hoisted from the waste pools adorned Urayne's side, keeping it alive.

"We have to get back," Viktor said, without removing his eyes from Urayne. "Rudi wants me to meet someone from Vinoville."

Lucille gave him a long look. "Please take care of yourself, Viktor."

Viktor shook his head. "I don't know what to do, Lucille. I'm not you. I don't know how to fight back."

There was a long silence.

"But I bet you'd know how to run," Lucille said.

As they made their way up the stairs back into the daylight, Lucille somehow knew that she would never see Viktor again.


	16. Chapter 16

It all started to unravel when Viktor disappeared.

He went quietly, so much so that for the first few days of his absence, even Rudi Larkspur failed to suspect anything. It was only after Viktor had neglected all communications for over a week that an alarm was raised at TAPCO. Being the man of influence he had become at the Institute, Viktor Kuritsyn had the potential to leak sensitive details of Larkspur’s, no, all of TAPCO’s, work to any party he wished to corroborate with, or any party who forced his co-operation.

The third person consulted by Rudi Larkspur, after Viktor’s secretary and Hen Rodriguez, was Lucille. He didn’t make light conversation of it.

“I know you’re involved,” was the first thing Larkspur spat as he barged into the little office at Epsilon.

“What are you talking about?” Lucille had replied, more than a little frightened. She hadn’t stopped thinking about the detonator and canister, which until recently had sat ready to fire in her filing cabinet.

“I’m talking about Viktor Kuritsyn,” Larkspur snarled. “Where is he?”

Lucille was taken aback. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since the mine opened.”

“Those were Hen’s exact words. Viktor hasn’t been seen or heard from since last Tuesday, and now you’re all telling the same goddamn story. One of you had better come clean soon, or you’ll all regret it.”

Lucille had tried to stop her heart from beating faster. So Viktor had listened to her. Viktor had run.

She remembered to reply to Larkspur, who was turning an unbecoming shade of puce. “Maybe we’re all telling the same story because it’s the truth.”

“Bullshit,” Larkspur roared. “We achieve stasis, the most important discovery of the decade, and Kuritsyn disappears a month later. Don’t you dare try to tell me this isn’t connected.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Rudi.” Lucille tried to maintain her calm.

“You’re fired,” Larkspur bellowed. “You’re fired by the end of the month, unless you bring Viktor back to me with a satisfactory explanation…”

Lucille waited. The corner of Larkspur’s mouth turned up.

“…Or you produce for me a paper of international significance, which will place TAPCO Larkspur firmly on the world map. You must produce Viktor, or you must produce something which makes Viktor and the bygone era so obsolete I might just choose to forget about them.”

It was too easy. Lucille should have known. It was too easy.

Larkspur had been playing a game of cat and mouse, where he was the lion, and Lucille was the wooden windup mouse with a broken spring.

Lucille had known that stasis was the ‘something’ which Rudi Larkspur had referred to, the ‘something’ which would wipe clean the figurative slate, absolve TAPCO and all of its proponents of past sins, something so huge that the scientific community would be talking about it for centuries to come. It seemed absurd and far-fetched to the minds of most, that such a principle was even feasible within the realm of their world, let alone applicable to the solution of everyday problems.

But Lucille, along with Viktor, Hen, and Rudi Larkspur, knew better.

With Urayne by her side, watching over her in its cocoon of sedation, Lucille Mayer slaved away at her work. Kellyn knew that her career, thus their livelihood and Ari’s life, depended on this paper, so he happily tolerated not seeing his wife for days at a time. His sacrifice, he reasoned, was much smaller than hers.

Lucille convinced Hen Rodriguez to help with the monumental stack of calculations. Their programs ran through the night, sucking up the combined computing power of hundreds of desktop PCs through the entire TAPCO network. Lucille and Hen would be co-authors on the paper, and they would go down in history.

Anyone would have believed that things were starting to look up.

On the 12th February, Lucille submitted the completed manuscript to a prestigious scientific journal. She was met with a fraction of the enthusiasm she felt the discovery deserved, but she acknowledged that people would take time to come around to the idea of stasis as a useful phenomenon. It might take an energy shortage, or a war, but eventually someone would realise the significance of her discovery.

Lucille Mayer waited patiently. Days turned into weeks, and news of the paper’s acceptance was still yet to arrive. Still Lucille waited. 

One month after the submission, she started to feel that Rudi Larkspur had forgotten about his threat. He had not contacted her since their argument. For the first time since Christmas, Lucille allowed herself to breathe. When she saw herself in the mirror, she started to think, _I’m going to be okay_.

The day dawned bright and clear on which Lucille found out just how wrong she had been.

The day started like any other. She poured herself a coffee and made small talk with Kellyn. She received an update on Ari’s condition, which had stagnated. Doctors had warned them this plateau signalled the beginning of the end, but neither Lucille nor Kellyn had enough time to indulge in any feeling on the matter. She picked up her monthly copy of the prestigious scientific journal, which had slipped through the door during breakfast, and headed off to catch the Epsilon ferry.

Fourteen minutes into the trip, Lucille turned a page in the journal and read, “Principles of Gravitational Stasis and Applications to Storage of Biological Materials”. Her title!

It took around ten seconds for Lucille to realise the writing below the title was not her own. Lifting her eyes back to the top of the page, Lucille took in the authors’ names: V. Kuritsyn, and R. Larkspur.

Lucille stepped off the ferry and the warm autumn breeze felt alien.

Rudi Larkspur ambled over from the power plant to greet her, a gloating smile adorning his face, a deliberate glance addressing the magazine in her hand. “Looks like you were too slow, Dr. Mayer,” he said pleasantly. “Oh well, it happens.”

“You stole my work,” Lucille said vilely. “You and Viktor!”

“Let’s not go making baseless accusations,” Larkspur said calmly. “You know just as well as I do that your work here belongs to me. There is no stealing involved, as you so graciously put it. Viktor was the driving force behind the project, before he rudely absconded. Don’t you agree this is fair?”

“You…” Lucille spluttered, frightened by the intensity of her own anger. “You know where Viktor is?”

“Actually, I don’t,” said Larkspur. “I never did. But I believe in giving credit where it’s due. And seeing as you don’t seem able to tell me his whereabouts or produce an original paper, I suppose I have no choice but to fire you. You have one week to pack up and get out. Don’t set foot on this island again. I have Hen Rodriguez’s assurance that your presence will not be overlooked.”  

That night, Lucille returned to the mainland in shock.

In less than 24 hours, she had gone from having a friend in Viktor, an ally in Hen, and a charge in Urayne, to having nothing but the smouldering remains of a career. She couldn’t process any of it, and she couldn’t face Kellyn. Not like this.

She went to the hospital.

Ari was asleep, hanging onto life by that stage, and Lucille let the silence both comfort and guilt her at the same time.

She never heard his footsteps as he entered.

“I didn’t expect to see you here.” Kellyn’s voice was cold and jolted Lucille awake. She had been about to drift off. A chill ran down her spine as she turned around to face him.

“What happened?” she asked.

“What happened?” Kellyn replied. “Good question. What happened four years ago so that a one-way flight from Bealbeach to Inhore City turned up under my name at the travel agent’s today?”

Lucille couldn’t even comprehend what he’d said at first.

“You were going to leave me?” Lucille’s silence was like fuel to the fire. “You were going to force me to choose between my home and my family? Just spring it on me once we’d arrived in Zhery?”

Lucille’s stomach sank. Kellyn had stumbled upon the ugly truth, the one secret she’d kept from him all these years. He was staring at her like she had personally stripped him of his soul.

“I would’ve let you keep Ari,” Lucille mumbled.

“Stop talking,” Kellyn said, his face crumpling. “I was wrong. I don’t want to hear this after all.” 

“You’re a great husband and father,” Lucille blurted out, her head pounding. “I’m sorry I was never better at this family thing. Ari and I are very lucky to have you.”

“Please stop talking.” Kellyn’s voice was very small. It cut into Lucille like a sword.

The next sound they heard pulled them both out from the fire they’d lit. Ari was flatlining. Their heart monitor began emitting a shrill, continuous tone, and within seconds doctor and nurses had flooded the room, pushing Lucille and Kellyn aside like pieces of driftwood.

“What’s going on?” Kellyn demanded. “What’s wrong?”

“We don’t know yet,” the doctor said, not even looking at him.

“Fluid build-up in the chest,” one of the nurses broke in.

“We need to get him to an OR right now.” The doctor’s reaction was lightning fast. She led the team out, pushing Ari’s bed before her.

That night, Ari was placed into an induced coma. Nobody could tell them how long it would be for, or whether the child would come out of it the same person. We just don’t know, the doctors kept saying, and Kellyn walked out.

Lucille never found out where he went. She begged him not to do this because of her, not to make her feel responsible.

She couldn’t fix the past. She couldn’t fix Ari.

She couldn’t fix Ari…


	17. Chapter 17

In the end, everything repeats. We keep thinking and hoping that things will change, that things will get better, that the world will keep turning. This possibility of a happy ending is a very powerful thing. But even the world’s turning is a form of repetition, a mere illusion of movement, and nothing ever really changes.

On the 1st of March 2006, Lucille Mayer left TAPCO for good.

Walking out of that oppressive basement was somehow worse than her departure from Silverport, which made no sense as Lucille’s attachment to Epsilon was minimal at best. Nonetheless, as she shifted box after box of papers out to her car, she also carried a heavy weight in her heart.

Kellyn was still yet to come home, so Lucille was left alone that night with the reminders of the life she once had.

Two months later, midwinter on the 14th June, communications channels throughout Tandor were plunged into chaos as the source of the massive radioactive contamination in the East was leaked to the press. By that point, the once-bustling Silverport had dwindled to a ghost town, and a twin exodus had gutted Snowbank too.

The unlucky, those too poor to put up rent in Venesi or relocate all the way across the Maskara Channel, had stayed. Thus, Silverport underwent a remarkable transformation; turning from a lush, opulent icon of coastal living, to a symbol of poverty, depravation, and fear. Those displaced and those left now learned that the source of their misfortunes was none other than TAPCO Larkspur.

“This is panic fuelled by pure speculation,” Rudi Larkspur orated to the media, standing amidst the perfectly manicured gardens of the facility while the outside world burned. “TAPCO is the pride of Tandor! Everything we do here has a clear and dignified purpose: advancing our status as a region and our knowledge as a species.”

“What about Viktor Kuritsyn?” people started to ask. “He was your right-hand man. Can you clarify the circumstances surrounding his departure?”

“Leaving was Viktor’s personal choice,” Larkspur replied every time.

“What about Lucille Mayer? Is it true she was the person who discovered stasis, not Viktor?”

“Lucille Mayer,” Larkspur said feelingly, “is nothing but a bitter, disappointed woman.”

When confronted about the unusually emotive nature of this statement, Larkspur replied off-handedly, “those were Viktor’s words, not mine.”

One week after the news broke, despite Larkspur’s desperate efforts to defend his organisation, Tandor’s regional government took action and shut down the lab. Fifteen cumulative years of reckless, unreported experiments on the mountain had destroyed the ecosystem, making the ground so radioactive that only ghost and ice type pokemon could now be seen via aerial surveillance.

“It was all a lie? The aggressive wild pokemon on Route 16; the crevasses? They were all a cover-up, weren’t they?”

Rudi Larkspur now realised the gravity of the situation. He kept his mouth firmly shut.

“We want justice!” the people of Tandor cried. “We want it now!”

The name ‘Larkspur’ quickly became synonymous with those of infamous dictators: Monster; Traitor; Destroyer of worlds. Relentless public pressure kept the government action going. Early in September, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Rudi Larkspur. He was to face charges of fraud, obstruction of justice, and gross environmental negligence.

Three days after the warrant was issued, rangers made a public admission that Larkspur’s whereabouts were unknown. Rudi Larkspur had become a fugitive.

Lucille watched the proceedings with a strange detachment. The old TAPCO Larkspur site was evacuated, and the monolith now stood abandoned on the slopes above Silverport Town. Eerily, not a twig sat out of place those first few weeks. The synchrotron building continued to gleam in the spring sunshine, and the gardens flourished after their recent pruning.

So, it was amidst this turmoil that Lucille was forced to come to terms with all she had lost: her job, Urayne, her friends, and her beloved husband. Kellyn still reported to work; she knew he did, as she often wandered past Ranger HQ in her tedium, and saw the light and movement in his office. She was never allowed inside.

Her losses would have been absolute had it not been for Ari. The child was now the last stronghold in Lucille’s life, and she grew increasingly committed to protecting this stronghold any way she had to. For Kellyn, or for herself; she didn’t know.

Ari was brought out of their coma not long after Larkspur disappeared, and given two months to live. Lucille knew she would never see Kellyn again if Ari died now; she had to find a way to give them both more time.

Lucille couldn’t fix Ari… or could she?

Her plan was firmly in place by the end of September. Things were business as usual at TAPCO Bealbeach; this was exploitable. Hen Rodriguez, once loyal to Larkspur, now had nobody to report to, so Lucille intended to just walk right in. Who would stop her?

The most difficult part of the task turned out to be removing Ari from the hospital.

“They’re terminal anyway,” Lucille hissed at the doctor, trying to keep her voice down for the child’s sake. “Let me take them to the beach one last time.”

“The stress on their body could kill them,” the doctor continued to reiterate. “I can’t grant such permission for a patient under my care.”

“I just want them to see the sun again, before… you know.”

The doctor’s mouth was a thin line. She pointed to the window by Ari’s bed, through which bright sunlight was streaming in.

Eventually, the hospital staff became so sick of seeing Lucille that they gave in to her demands. She was allowed to take Ari outside for three hours one Thursday afternoon, so long as they didn’t eat anything and kept a face mask on.

“Where are we going?” Ari asked her.

“To the beach,” Lucille replied. The nurses smiled at Ari as they walked out. Goodbye. See you soon. Have fun.

Lucille did not take Ari to the beach. She headed straight for the mainland dock and bundled them both onto the ferry to Epsilon Island.

“Where are we going?” Ari asked again.

“Somewhere safe,” Lucille replied, holding them tight against the buffeting wind.

The TAPCO receptionist knew Lucille. He greeted her with puzzlement, but there was no hostility in his manner.

“Lucille! It’s been a long time. Have you been well?”

“You could say that,” Lucille replied.

“Is this your child?” The receptionist pointed to Ari.

“Yes. Say hi, Ari.” Lucille gave Ari a shake, and they grunted in the young man’s direction. “I need a pass,” Lucille continued without missing a beat, “for the basement.”

“What happened to yours?”

Lucille frowned. He didn’t know. “I… I don’t have it.”

The receptionist had no reason to suspect anything. He issued Lucille with a visitor’s pass, and she signed the logbook as ‘Mayer’.

She was so close. She only needed two hours alone in the lab.

The stairway echoed as she carried Ari down into the basement. A few more steps, that was all. Lucille rounded the corner, and came face to face with Hen Rodriguez. She froze.

“Hen,” Lucille forced herself to say, gulping down her nerves after what seemed like an age.

Hen’s face was like a statue, completely void of expression. “Lucille,” he replied at last, nodding ever so slightly as he brushed past her, continuing on his way up the stairs.

For minutes after he left, Lucille could barely breathe. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was right behind her, and it was all about to come crashing down. It was only after she had prepared the bio-incubator, powered up the memory transfer station, and laid out all the chemicals and equipment she needed, that Lucille took a deep breath and told herself, _It’s okay. He’s gone._

And for once, she was right.

Lucille was not disturbed once during the two hours she spent in the power plant basement that day.

And so it happened, on the 30th September 2006, that Lucille Mayer cloned her child.

It had already been determined that Ari’s illness was not genetic, so extraction and transplantation of their DNA essentially enabled a “fresh start”. Lucille pushed her equipment to the limits of its capability, forcing the growth of the new person at several times the safe threshold. There was no other choice.

“What are you doing?” Ari asked, scratching at the spot on their arm where Lucille had inserted the hypodermic.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Lucille said, distracted by the complexities of the work. “I’m going to put you under, okay? Just like the doctors do at the hospital. You’re going to wake up, and you’ll be safe. You won’t feel a thing.”

Ari watched her curiously. “Am I going to die?”

“No,” Lucille said, taken aback. She was suddenly struck by some indescribable emotion, but she forced herself to rise above it. “You’re going to be fine.”

They lapsed into a comfortable silence. Drip, drip. Lucille's solutions began to take shape.

“I don’t mind,” Ari said suddenly.

“What?” Lucille’s head snapped up. She looked at Ari, looked at them properly for the first time that afternoon.

“I don’t mind if I die,” Ari said. “Everyone dies.”

Lucille swallowed the lump in her throat, letting it grate against her windpipe on its way down. “None of this is your fault,” she managed in a very small voice.

“I know,” Ari said.

Lucille turned away, fighting the tears. This would all be over soon. “I love you, Ari.”

“Where’s dad?”

“He’s coming,” Lucille lied as she pushed down on the syringe of strong sedative. She watched their eyes close and forced herself to continue working. This would all be over soon.

Once Ari had gone limp in her arms, Lucille gently eased one of the memory transceiver helmets onto their head. The other went onto the head of the clone. Taking a deep breath, Lucille pressed the switch, sending the jolt of electricity into Ari’s brain, forcing all their memories into the machine to be transferred to the clone.

Lucille had never attempted this process on a human before. The machine struggled to cope with the flood of signals arriving from the child’s brain. Lucille willed it to stay on line.

Despite her silent pleas, the transfer suffered a number of hiccups. Some memories were blacked out, or distorted, and Lucille was powerless to stop the corrupted signals from entering the clone. The final power surge was so strong it woke Ari up, and Lucille pushed the emergency shutdown button. The memory transfer process was incomplete, but nothing more could be done.

Lucille lifted the groggy Ari back into her arms, leaving the winged helmet on their head but detaching the mass of wires and electrodes. These fell quietly back to the floor, or swung back and forth gently if they didn't quite reach. 

“You’re okay,” Lucille murmured as the child tried to come out of the sedation.

“Is daddy here?” Ari asked, their eyes struggling to open.

“No, not yet,” Lucille whispered.

“I want my dad.”

Lucille deserved it. The child hated her. She would have hated herself if she was Ari.

“You’re going to be okay,” she said again, but each lie broke her down just a little more. The child's eyes fluttered closed; they would never remember the tears which had started streaming down her face.

Lucille's vision blurred as she wept, so that Ari's features looked to be shimmering and fading before her eyes. She realised with sudden clarity that she could not let this child die, even though she had succeeded in producing an almost exact, healthy copy. The grief would simply consume her whole. Her mind turned frantically as she paced from one end of the lab to the other. She had spent her whole life solving ever more complicated problems, but now Lucille Mayer was staring straight at an impenetrable wall.

A solid grey wall, curved and slightly luminous, right in front of her.

No… That wasn’t a wall.

That was a window.

Lucille hit the shutdown button on the stasis tank with such force that she lost feeling in her hand. She threw open the cover, ripped the second transceiver helmet from the clone, and sprinted back to the tank to place it on Urayne’s head. She then eased her bulky radiation suit over Ari’s tiny body, knotting the ends of the sleeves and legs, as if this could provide them a sense of security. It was perfect. The stasis would halt the deterioration of Ari's health. They no longer had to die. 

Urayne, freed momentarily from its gravitational restraints, directed a peculiar, obstinate gaze in Lucille's direction. The gaze held a message of caution, of warning, from one friend to another. Unfortunately, Lucille never looked up once to see it.

So, this was goodbye.

In the end, Lucille had no words for Ari. She held them close for a long, long time, then she let them go, watching the viscous stasis fluid swallow them up. They came to a rest beside Urayne with a small thump. Lucille closed the lid and stasis was resumed.

Before she left, Lucille returned one last time to the window, holding the clone - no, Ari - in her arms. “Please,” she implored Urayne, her hand pressed against the curved glass. “Please take care of them.”

Urayne stared back at Lucille with still, unblinking eyes.


	18. Everything goes back to the beginning

Everything goes back to the beginning.

Nobody batted an eye when Lucille carried Ari – she forced herself to think of her creation as Ari – out of the laboratory, up the stairs, past the reception desk, and onto the ferry.

“See you later,” the receptionist said cheerfully, waving to Ari. Ari had stared back blankly. They had no memory of this man.

Nobody noticed their presence as Lucille and Ari sat down quietly at the back of the deck-level passenger cabin. The child squirmed, full of energy, trying to see out of the round plate-glass windows.

“Mum, I thought we were going to the beach,” Ari whined.

“We are… Ari,” Lucille replied. “Look.”

Lucille lifted the child onto her knee, and together they watched the golden shores of Bealbeach City draw into view on the right.

A young couple splashed through the shallows, laughing as the bright summer sun danced off their skin. The woman tripped; she was caught by her boyfriend before she could face-plant into the waves. Lucille imagined Ari their age, grown up, living a normal life. They could go to school, have a job, make friends. It took her breath away when Lucille thought about how she’d made that possible.

But behind every miracle is a cost, a little piece of the world plunged into interminable darkness.

Lucille took Ari to the beach. She watched her child play in the sand for the first time. She bought them an icy pole, and watched drops of fluorescent orange melt slide down their chin and soak into their T-shirt.

Too soon, their time was up. Lucille rushed Ari back to the hospital to make the three-hour cutoff.

“Where is their mask?” was the first thing the nurses asked, worry and disdain seeping into their voices as they considered Ari’s slovenly appearance. Too late, Lucille remembered the doctor’s instructions.

“It was too hot,” she improvised.

“Hence the icy pole?” The nurse’s voice was acid as she pointed to the orange dots decorating Ari’s chest. Lucille’s bravado dried up, irritating the nurse further. “I told the doctor she was making a mistake,” she snapped to nobody in particular.

The doctor in question was presently summoned, and Ari was hooked back onto the bank of machines monitoring their vitals.

“Dr Mayer.” The doctor sat beside Lucille, her face grave. “I know you only want the best for Ari, but you put them in a lot of danger today by not following my instructions.”

They both turned at the sound of a crash. A box of pills had toppled from the bedside table, onto which Ari was now trying to climb for a look out the window.

The doctor frowned, trying to remember what she had been saying as the nurses hurried to restrain the child.

“I sincerely hope that Ari’s prognosis will be unaffected by today’s events.”

“They’re not sick anymore,” Lucille croaked, and the room fell silent.

“Excuse me?” the doctor said gently.

“They’re not sick anymore. Look at them.” Lucille forced her voice to greater clarity.

“Their vitals are good,” one of the nurses said doubtfully. The doctor shot her a warning glance, before turning back to Lucille with a pitying gaze.

“You should get some rest,” the doctor said, laying a comforting hand on Lucille’s arm. “And for your reference, we offer wonderful counselling services on the third floor.”

She had no idea whether the counselling services were wonderful or not, but here finally was a situation for which the doctor had trained. She had found Lucille and Kellyn’s attitude towards the child’s wellbeing to be bizarre. She couldn’t deny that they cared, but the emotions they displayed were unusual, avoidant. Then again, the doctor was in a happy relationship herself, so she couldn’t have known what it was like for them.

“Take their blood,” Lucille said.

“I’m sorry?” The doctor was taken aback.

“Take their blood,” Lucille said again. “I’m not crazy.”

The doctor took a deep breath. “We did a test this morning, remember?” she said, a hint of irritation showing through her professional façade. “The white cell count was extremely low.”

“Then do it again,” Lucille said.

Rolling her eyes, the doctor motioned to the nurse, who shrugged and moved forward with a syringe.

“I’m not sure what you’re expecting,” the doctor said with a small smile. “But you are the one paying, so you can have your blood test.”

When the doctor saw Lucille again the next morning, all traces of condescension and pity were gone. Lucille even fancied she saw respect, a begrudging submission. Suddenly shy, Lucille forced herself to at least try to enjoy the doctor’s admission that she had been right.

But she couldn’t, because she just wasn’t that sort of person.

“We ran the tests twice more,” the doctor was saying. “We just couldn’t believe it. The antibiotics must have finally worked, against all the odds. Ari is healthy. It’s a miracle, Dr Mayer. I don’t know what else to call it.”

It was a miracle for the doctors, because they had never seen anything like it before, and it was a miracle for Lucille, because it brought Kellyn back.

He still wouldn’t answer Lucille’s calls, so she had him contacted from the nurses’ desk. He came straight away.

Seeing Ari playing and talking like any four-year-old had an instantaneous, remarkable effect on Kellyn. Even the nurses were shocked, exchanging glances behind his back. The moment that Ari first smiled at him, it was as though Kellyn had shed every painful memory from the past four years, and the man who Lucille had married emerged from within the leaden shell.

“We did it,” he said, his voice unusually thick with emotion. “We did it, Lucille.” Then he grabbed his wife and child in a hug so tight that neither thought he would ever let go.

They went home together that night. _Everything’s going to be okay now,_ Lucille told herself again and again. Once or twice, for a few minutes at a time, she even started to believe it.

The truth was, although Kellyn never brought it up, he had his suspicions about Ari’s miraculous recovery. Was it an experimental treatment which Lucille had signed off on without consulting him? Was it an initial misdiagnosis which had been spotted at the last moment? And why did Ari behave oddly sometimes, almost as if they were a different person? Had the treatment given them amnesia? Kellyn knew it would take a long time for him to begin trusting his wife again.

So, when he cuddled with her and Ari and said, “I hope nothing ever tears us apart again,” he would sometimes ask himself afterwards why he believed it so much.

Lucille got the call in early November. TAPCO Bealbeach had been assessing redundancies from the Silverport lab, and thought it preposterous that a bright mind like Lucille Mayer hadn’t been claimed sooner by one of the other business units. She was offered a permanent position at Epsilon Island, working on decommissioning the old “Larkspur lab” in the basement, then, once that was complete, an overhaul of the FNR program. She could even work on stasis if she so wished; TAPCO had identified promising uses for the technology in the development of next gen submarines and warships.

Lucille baulked at the suggestion. “I won’t have anything to do with warships,” she told them.

But she couldn’t decline the offer to work with Urayne again. Here was the second chance she had been waiting for – her chance to save Urayne once and for all; rescue the pokemon from its politically fraught existence at TAPCO. She would also be able to deal with… Lucille shook her head. She didn’t want to think about that until she had to.

Lucille accepted the job, on the condition that she would not be involved in work on any vessels of war.

Her first task in the new role was to co-ordinate the redistribution of materials and equipment which had been recovered from her old department at TAPCO Silverport. Looking over the list, Lucille identified many familiar, routine items: Class 4 lasers from the spectroscopy lab, Sheebit cages, bio-incubators, and row upon row of chemical reagents. What unnerved her was the fact that Rudi Larkspur’s stylus had been located, but the serum had not. Both items would have been kept at the hush-hush lab Rudi was running on the mountain. It made no sense for him to take off with the inferior product only.

Lucille suspected that the serum had fallen into hands other than Larkspur’s, and she wasn’t sure if she liked that any better than the alternative.

So, on the quiet, Lucille began disappearing into her lab for long periods of time, working on an antidote to the serum. Her colleagues had long since given up trying to elucidate information on Lucille’s scientific endeavours; the first they heard about them usually came from a journal article. So, they just let her work. Somebody else took over the administrative tasks without being asked.

On the 15th November 2006, the first fifty millilitres of pure antidote dripped into a collection vial from the bottom of an extraction column. Satisfied, Lucille fused the compound into a plastic atomiser for easy dispersal.

Bang!

Lucille jumped.

Bang, bang.

She took a deep breath to calm her nerves. It was just a knock at the door. Placing the vial of antidote into her lab coat pocket, Lucille walked towards the door, stretching out her back, which had been bent over the retort for hours.

“Yes?” Lucille asked the nervous-looking lad standing in the hallway.

“Dr Mayer.” He spoke quickly, as if he had practised the words many times in his head. “We need you to join a tour of the uranium mine. Hen Rodriguez was supposed to do it, but he hasn’t shown up today, and he isn’t answering his phone. Is that okay?”

“Um, can’t Cedric go?” Lucille asked, frowning. Cedric Parker had been picked up by Bealbeach too.

“He’s on the tour already,” the lad said, almost tripping over his own tongue in his haste. “We need two representatives.”

Lucille sighed. “Okay.”

She called Kellyn after that. He didn’t pick up, so she left a message. “Hey. I’m going to be home late. I just got roped into a mine tour, and I haven’t finished my work yet. Don’t wait for me. See you tonight.”

Lucille looked the part of the mad scientist as she stepped off the shuttle bus and joined the gaggle of professionals waiting inside the site office. Even Cedric Parker had made an effort, donning a scruffy suit jacket and combing his hair. Lucille pulled at her dirty lab coat and cleared her throat, before shuffling to the back of the pack.

“Well, hello,” the strange man next to her said, after several minutes of silence had elapsed. Lucille’s head snapped up. She took in the man’s bizarre shock of red hair, a streak of yellow running through the centre. He was middle aged. The hairstyle was unbecoming.

“Hello,” Lucille replied.

“I’m Cameron Caine, electrical engineer on site,” the man said, extending a hand.

“Lucille Mayer,” Lucille said, accepting his hand. It was slightly sweaty. “I’m a scientist.”

Cameron Caine was a talker. He talked about his life, the mundane nine-to-five routine he led, his baby son Theo, and the various particulars of mine electrification. He talked on and on, and Lucille found two things odd: first, that he never mentioned a partner, and second, that he never asked anything of her. It could just have been an overinflated ego, which would not have been at odds with the man’s appearance, but Lucille didn’t think so.

“My kid’s four,” she offered cautiously. “How are you surviving the terrible twos?”

Cameron laughed. “Let’s just say, I’m glad they don’t do bring your kids to work here. So, you work at the power plant, you said?”

There it was.

“Yes. I’m part of TAPCO’s FNR – fast neutron reactor – program.”

She’d known it. She hadn’t told him where she worked.

“How’s that going?” Cameron’s voice was extremely genuine; a hint of curiosity, a hint of friendly concern. Underneath the ludicrous hair, he had an open, trustworthy sort of face. Lucille almost laughed when she thought about how it was all a lie. In this world, there were only lies. She told them, she was told them, and the man in front of her now was living one. She just couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

“The technology’s good, but we don’t have takers yet. You know how the press likes to scare everyone away from nuclear power.”

Cameron chuckled. “Good thing there are people like us who know better.”

“Mmm,” Lucille said.

Cameron waited patiently, and Lucille became increasingly antsy. Damn, this man was good. “I wasn’t always employed by Bealbeach,” she blurted out at last. “I used to work under Rudi Larkspur.”

Cameron raised an eyebrow. “He’s the guy who went rogue, yeah?”

Maybe she _was_ going crazy. Maybe Cameron _was_ just a normal guy who thought too highly of himself.

“Yes. He created some awful technologies for brainwashing pokemon… I’m afraid, because one of them hasn’t been –”

“Hello all, apologies for the delay!” a booming voice compressed every eardrum in the cramped site office. “My name’s Stan, I’m the assistant manager of this mine, and I’ll be showing you around today. Everyone got a visitor badge?”

Stan took a drink from a flask attached to his belt. The water made him cough, which Lucille found strange.

“Let’s talk later,” Cameron said quietly, as they filed out in a rough line behind Stan.

As it turns out, they never got a chance to.

The tour started out normally, with a viewing of the open pit operations to the north. Further south, closer to the power plant, several underground ore bodies were being worked. The visitors were allowed access to one of the shafts, from which stoping operations could be viewed.

“We’re not blasting today though,” Stan said jovially. “So it won’t be very exciting.”

The occupants made light conversation as the cage lift clattered downwards to the bottom of the shaft. It decelerated as it approached drift level, before contacting the floor with a resounding crash. The tunnel walls seemed to shudder, and the sound of falling rock was audible in the distance.

“I thought you said you weren’t blasting,” Cedric Parker joked.

His voice quickly trailed off when he saw that Stan’s face had drained of blood.

“We’re not,” Stan said.

Five seconds of perilous silence elapsed. Then, two things happened simultaneously. Firstly, the lift door opened, and secondly, a heavyset door barring entry to a side passage was wrenched from its hinges by an explosion of cataclysmic proportions. A mushroom cloud of orange flame arced through the void where the door had been, the intense wave of heat and pressure knocking the lift occupants to the ground and causing the lift to rattle against its guiderails.

Panic tore through Lucille. They were close to the power plant.

“What’s down that passage?” she gasped, and she could barely hear her own voice.

Stan mouthed something at her. Lucille strained to hear through the ringing in her ears.

“What?” Lucille screamed at Stan.

“The power plant basement.” Stan’s reply was faint, distant, a mere whisper of sound, though she could see he was shouting the words.

Not bothering to wait for assistance, Lucille dragged herself to her feet.

“What are you doing?” Stan’s murmuring reached her, but Lucille paid it no heed. “Stay here!”

Lucille sprinted for the passage.

“Lucille! Wait!” A different voice; Cedric Parker.

As she passed into the tunnel, Lucille saw shredded hydraulic lines and wires dangling from a charred and smoking ignition point on the ceiling. She never registered their meaning. A gated fuel depot on the right was burning out of control, half the drums ruptured and the others dangerously close.

Her hands shaking, Lucille turned the primitive lock on the basement door. It came off in her hands, and the door swung open.

At that moment, the remaining fuel drums blew, and the tunnel walls caved behind her. Lucille shrieked and plunged herself head-first into the laboratory, landing on something soft.

“H… Hen,” Lucille stammered, as she realised what she’d landed on. “Hen, are you okay?”

Hen’s eyes stared straight and unblinking at the ceiling, grotesquely unfocused. Lucille felt the rise and fall of his chest beneath her. He was alive, but something was wrong.

Suddenly, a bizarre feeling began to take Lucille over. It was as if she were floating out of her own body, but not upwards, or downwards, or in any other three-dimensional direction.

“Lucille?” Cedric Parker’s voice found its distorted way to her.

“Turn around,” Lucille tried to mumble, but the sounds she made sounded like marbles rolling around a conical flask. “Turn around. It’s not safe here.”

The last thought Lucille formed before she blacked out was not of Kellyn, or Ari, or even of Viktor. As Lucille lay sprawled on that cool laboratory floor, all she could focus on was the sound of the air conditioning, and how much it sounded like a mighty rainstorm.

The showers really were different in Tandor.


	19. A new chapter of our story is beginning

  _Where am I? It’s dark, but it’s warm._

_How long have I been out? An hour, maybe more?_

I wiggled my arms and legs; they seemed to work. My head was aching like mad, as if it had been struck with a sledgehammer, but my thoughts were clear. I remembered an explosion, and Cedric running behind me…

“Cedric.” I tried my voice. “Cedric, what happened?”

There was no response. I peeled my eyes open, and sucked in a breath.

I was lying in some sort of cave. Had Cedric dragged me back into the tunnel? Impossible, the place had just gone up in flames. Had the explosion torn the lab to pieces, and left this shell behind?

I still had my lab coat on, but over the top was another item of clothing. A blue jacket, like a cheap imitation of Kellyn’s ranger uniform.

Kellyn!

_I have to find Kellyn, or Viktor…_

I dragged myself to my feet, reeling as the blood drained from my head. The cave was dimly lit – I could see it was some sort of drift, but it was too quiet to be part of a mine. There, in the distance. A door.

I arrived at the door and my hand reached into my lab coat pocket of its own accord, emerging with a key. I frowned. I hadn’t known about a key. It was almost like muscle memory, but the very thought was ridiculous. Muscle memory took years to develop; a decade, even.

On the other side of the door, a steep set of steps led upwards, towards the surface I assumed. I cautiously crept up the stairs, and poked my head out into the night. I was presently hit with a wall of dry, languid air. Strange – this didn’t feel like Bealbeach, where the air was always heavy with moisture, and strong breezes blew off the coast. Perhaps a high pressure system had moved in.

At that moment, the roar of an engine distracted my attention.

I turned around, and my head pulsed as I struggled to take in my surroundings. I seemed to have emerged from an underground passage, smack bang in the middle of a city. But it wasn’t any city I knew. Before me unfolded street after cobbled street, tightly packed with Victorian brick terraces. This couldn’t possibly be Epsilon Island, or modern, glitzy Bealbeach.

I sucked in a breath when I realised where I’d seen this place before. Only briefly, but I had seen it.

Turning away from the town, I confirmed my suspicions. In the distance, the lights of the ferry terminal blinked away, reflecting in the still waters of a wide bay; the same ferry terminal where I had transferred ship between Silverport and Bealbeach, all those years ago. I had somehow landed in Venesi City.

The source of the engine roar now revealed itself. A speedboat, packed with people and pokemon, was driving dangerously close to the wharfs. I could make out the forms of three adults and a child. Distant cheering could be heard, ascending even above the sound of the motor. I imagined Ari partaking in such activities and scowled.

Ari!

If I had ended up in Venesi, what had happened to Ari? Both Aris? My headache was becoming even more blinding. I located a public water fountain and hydrated myself.

I needed to find somebody I knew, but I had no phone, no money. The only things in my pockets were my keys, and the vial of serum antidote I had placed there this morning. I had no choice but to make my way into the city.

As I descended the hill towards the waterfront, I watched the speedboat dock outside town, beneath a cliff. Two of the adults climbed out, dragging the child between them. I stared. As he walked beneath a streetlight, I clearly saw that the child had a shock of bright red hair, with a streak of yellow running through the centre; a mirror image of the engineer, Cameron Caine. This could not be a coincidence.

An idea started to form in my mind. Cameron must have had something to do with my enigmatic transplantation. Perhaps he had evacuated the laboratory after the explosion, and brought me to safety in Venesi City. But why would he leave me in the sewers? None of it made any sense.

I turned off my path and made for the small group. I hid out behind a building, waiting for them to reach my position. I couldn’t bring myself to accost the two strange adults, but the boy was lagging behind, so I approached him.

“Excuse me,” I said, my heart pounding. I gulped and tried to pull myself together. Why was I afraid of a child?

“Woah…” the boy said, staring at me as if I had two heads, or was glowing fluorescent green. What was his deal?

“Can I borrow a phone?” I asked.

“Um… no,” he replied, scowling at me. “I don’t know you. Ari, wait up!” He quickly ran after the adults, and one of them turned at his call. I almost passed out on the spot – their hair was the same mousy brown as Kellyn’s, and they had my nose… It wasn’t possible. No way. This person looked to be at least eighteen years old.

“Wait!” I called as loudly as I dared to the boy. He stopped and turned around to face me, his brows furrowed.

“What do you want?” he whined, as I jogged to catch up.

“What’s that person’s name again?”

“Ari, why?”

My hands started to shake. “Do you know Cameron Caine? It’s just… you…”

“Cameron Caine is my dad,” the boy said, puffing up his chest. “I know, we look like each other. Who are you, then?”

“Just… someone he knows.” It wasn’t possible. Theo, Cameron’s baby son, was only two years old.

The boy rolled his eyes. “His friends are always like that. They never answer my questions. So, do you want to use my phone or not?”

He was holding something out to me in his hand; it had the appearance of a screen, but it was completely flat and came with no accompanying electronics. He pressed a button on the side, and the screen lit up in a fluorescent display. He then swept his finger across the surface, and the display changed. It was my turn to stare in consternation.

“Uh, what’s wrong?” Theo asked, staring at me as if I were a complete moron.

“Nothing,” I managed to say. So, Cameron must have been involved in high-level military work; intelligence, perhaps. His son had a touchscreen smartphone. It would also explain the lying.

I almost stopped breathing when I looked down at the display. No, I was wrong. I was so wrong about everything.

There, on the top right corner of the phone, was written the date. 27th November 2016.

“Okay, this is getting weird,” Theo said, after I had stared unblinking at the phone for half a minute. “I need to go. Give me my phone back.”

“Is the date right?” I asked, my throat parched despite my recent drink.

“Of course it’s right, it’s linked to the network,” Theo snapped, scowling.

I handed the phone wordlessly back to him, and let him go. I followed at a distance, until Ari – it had to be my Ari. How old were they now? 14? They looked so grown up – and the other person, a woman with black hair, stopped in front of one of the terraces. Ari knocked on the door with what appeared to be a hammer tied to a string. I frowned. Was this a 2016 fad too?

A middle-aged couple answered the door. They all seemed to know each other. Before my child could disappear inside, I quickly rushed up the path, and shrugged off my jacket to give to them. They were only wearing a tank top.

I needed time to process all of this. Unfortunately, I was not given much. As the sun began to rise over Venesi City, the bizarre extra-dimensional feeling I’d felt earlier began to take me over again. I tried to fight it, but it was no use. I slipped right back into deep unconsciousness.

…

The next time I emerged from the strange coma, I was prepared. I again found myself in a new town, one I’d never seen before. The first thing I did was locate a newsagent, and use the materials therein to orient myself in space and time. So, I was in Tsukinami Village, East Tandor, and the date was November 29th 2016\. Only a couple of days had passed. Maybe the effect of the poison was starting to wear off.

The poison…

Something sparked inside my mind as I produced that thought. I had lost control of my mind and body, not long after Rudi Larkspur’s serum had gone missing. The air conditioning was on that day in the basement: what if Hen's frozen appearance was due to the serum too? It must have been dispersed via the air conditioning!

It wasn’t until I had walked up the hill to get a better view of the town that I thought to extract the antidote from my lab coat pocket. This was something I would curse myself for later. I could already feel the wooziness starting to take me again, and I could barely lift the tiny vial in my hand as I worked to place it in a small bag.

“Hello ma’am, are you okay?” I heard an unfamiliar voice by my side as I collapsed onto a nearby bench. I turned my head towards its source and tried to focus my eyes; a concerned face, an ornately patterned dress, long locks of silky black hair.

“My name is Hinata,” the person said softly. “Can you hear me?”

“Give this… to Ari,” I slurred. I was taking a gamble. This person didn’t know me, and they almost certainly didn’t know Ari.

I relinquished the vial of antidote to the stranger, and the darkness closed in.

…

The last time I woke up, I was not afforded the luxury of walking off to find a newsagent.

Coughing violently on some sort of choking atmosphere, my eyes stung as they filled with dust. It was as if I’d wandered into a sandstorm, but when I finally managed to take in the scene around me, I felt like the dust had ceased to exist.

Urayne, blown up to several hundred times its normal size, was hovering above the ground several metres away from me. And, to my left, a group of people sat bound and trussed on the floor. My heart lurched. Ari was there, and Theo, and their black-haired friend. So was Cameron Caine. But what got me, what brought tears to my eyes, was the sight of Kellyn restrained alongside them.

Urayne let out a roar, the generators on its arm springing into life. Was it preparing to attack? I spun around to look at it, and that’s when I saw the tiny figure perched on the pokemon’s shoulder – the tiny figure wearing a winged transceiver helmet, a face mask, and my bulky radiation suit. My baby.

Suddenly, it all became clear. My baby Ari had orchestrated all of this, and trained Urayne until it became the terrifying spectre which now loomed before me. Whether it was the stasis that had corrupted their mind, I didn’t know. All I knew was that it was too late.

I looked around again. I saw Hen Rodriguez, Cedric Parker, and several others in blue ranger uniforms – all frozen, standing guard over us. The serum!

“The bag!” I shouted, turning towards the other Ari, the older one. “The bag! Hinata gave it to you, didn’t she?”

Ari obviously had no idea what I was talking about. They looked like they’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. My heart sank when I thought about what they must have been through, what I’d put them both through.

“Lucille?” Kellyn’s voice brought me back to the present. The lines on his face ran deep, and his eyes were inscrutable.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. I had no idea if he heard me.

“I won’t let you ruin it, Ari!” my baby was shouting from atop Urayne’s shoulder. “Not after everything I’ve done for you!”

I tore myself away from Kellyn. “Please, don’t hurt them!” I begged. There had to be something of that sweet, innocent child left in there. “I still love you, I promise.” My voice cracked as I said it, but I meant it with everything I had left.

"You're disgusting! Both of you!” my baby shouted, and it shocked me to the core. “You never thought about how I suffered, just so you could continue with your disgusting, miserable lives!"

Urayne raised its arms, preparing to unleash a powerful nuclear attack. I was dismayed at what my friend had become.

Suddenly, an ear-splitting YOWL emanated from the side of the arena. What was that? Three things happened instantaneously. Firstly, I saw Hen, Cedric, and the others start to relax from their stiffened stances, a medley of confusion and vitality entering their eyes. Secondly, Kellyn reached forward to grab me and pull me to the ground. And, finally, a blinding pulse of luminous energy exploded from Urayne, directed straight towards us, and every ounce of it was absorbed by a green cat-like creature which had just leapt into the path of the beam.

The cat crashed, lifeless, into the barricade of rock and dust surrounding us. Complete silence settled over the arena.

“Kitty,” Ari wailed. So, it had been their pokemon. A strange feeling stabbed at my chest; to see my child grown up and defending me moved me beyond words.

Urayne was gearing up for another attack. Ari had no useable pokemon left to fight with; there was no way any of us would survive a meeting with Proton Beam. Suddenly, shouts rang out from all around. My heart started to thud as I lifted my eyes to see trainers of all ages and types, clambering left, right, and centre over the barricade, shouting orders to their pokemon, which charged towards Urayne. It was as if a floodgate had opened.

“We’ve got your back, Ari,” they seemed to be saying.

“We’ll help you beat this thing.”

Tears pricked at my eyes, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know my child anymore; I hadn’t brought them up. But still the tears came.

With the myriad of smaller pokemon attacking it from all directions, Urayne was sufficiently enraged to unleash a last ditch attempt to save itself, a massive fallout which decimated the large majority of assailants. Following this ultimate discharge of energy, Urayne imploded, decaying from its new, mighty forme to the shape I was so intimately familiar with. As Alpha Urayne hovered harmlessly amidst the swirling dust storm its predecessor had stirred up, I saw my years at TAPCO flash by before my eyes. The bio-incubators, Viktor and Rudi, the peephole in the Sheebit shed, the stasis tank. How had everything gone so wrong?

But I couldn’t be worrying about TAPCO or Urayne.

Every person watched in horrified (or was it relieved?) silence as baby Ari toppled down from where Urayne’s shoulder had been. They crashed into the ground, sending up a thick cloud of dust. It was all very final.

I moved forward instinctively to be with my child. As I took their mask off, I was aware of Ari’s confounded reaction behind me, but it was too late to go back. I held the child close, wanting them to at least know that I was sorry before they died, and I became aware that they were all staring at me. Ari, Kellyn, Theo, Cameron; every single one of them waiting for an explanation.

I took a deep breath. No more lies. No more running.

I told them everything. I told them about the serum, about Urayne, about Ari, both the clone and the original. The look of betrayal in Kellyn’s eyes, the look of fear in Ari’s, were almost too much to bear, but I forced myself to push forward. This had gone on long enough. It had to end now.

So I talked.

Ari, the small one, died in front of me that day. I’d thought the grief would overwhelm me, but it actually gave me a sort of closure, though it was a tragedy in itself. I had made this child into a monster. Now they were gone, and I would have to live with that forever, but I felt like I could finally begin to move on.

After all, I still had a family to take care of. I had my teenage child, Ari, my husband, and Urayne. I had to make things right with all of them, and now was a really good time for a new start.

As Ari ran out of the arena to process everything that had happened, I talked to Urayne. Go and make sure they’re okay, please. I hugged Kellyn tight, and shook hands with Cameron. I introduced myself properly to Theo, and Ari’s friend Rosalind.

“Well, I’ve only heard that you’re a bit of an asshole,” Rosalind joked. “But you produced Ari – literally – so you can’t be all that bad.”

I knew in that moment that we were all going to be okay, even if it took time. I looked gratefully at my husband, who was still here, despite everything, and the friends, the life, that my child had made for themselves.

I took a deep breath. Come rain or come shine, a new chapter of our story was beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this and leaving kudos, everyone! I never expected the reception to be so positive :D
> 
> I wrote this fanfiction as a tribute to Lise Meitner, the physicist who never lost her humanity. Lise Meitner is one of the most underappreciated names in nuclear science, and I wish more people knew about her. She was the discoverer of fission, but not many people remember her as such, due to the fact that her thunder was stolen by the man who was once her mentor, Otto Hahn, while she was stateless and seeking refuge from Hitler's regime. 
> 
> In this fic, Lucille Mayer = Lise Meiter, and Viktor Kuritsyn = Otto Hahn (Kuritsyn and Hahn mean rooster in Russian and German respectively). Rudi Larkspur was a very loose Hitler, and Kellyn an even looser Otto Frisch. 
> 
> Obviously the events to do with Ari, Kellyn, Curie etc. were purely fictional, but many things (events, relationships, aspects of Lucille's character) were based on Meitner. 
> 
> Please do me a favour and look her up, she's one of my favourite historical figures and she needs to be better known :P


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